Something I dislike about Raid the Docks is that a single card negates the main weakness of a deck, in this case that aggro decks eventually run out of steam.
Odyn, Prime Designate has the same problem: normally, a control deck would either have to dedicate multiple card slots to a win condition or assemble a win condition from discovered cards, but this one card solves that weakness.
Similarly, Deathstalker Rexxar, while one of my favorite cards, was rightly criticized for giving any Hunter deck a decent late game for the minimal investment of a single card slot.
Power level was definitely part of the problem, but because they were powerful, they saw a lot of play and therefore the other problems questlines had were much more noticeable. Nobody was calling for Bloodreaver Gul'dan to be nerfed when he came out, despite it being one of the best hero cards of the set; the calls for a nerf only started once Warlock got strong cards in a later set that brought it back into the meta. Today, nobody is calling for Orion, Mansion Manager to be nerfed despite it being an absolutely infuriating card to play against.
I think the biggest issue was that questlines (and regular quests and hero cards before them) made many games feel the same. As I wrote in another reply above, I think that's mostly due to the rewards and in particular the completion rewards, not the questline mechanic itself.
Very sad to see Blizzard are completely removing the mode from the client. Not sure why they can't treat it the same as Mercenaries but the client is getting quite cumbersome I guess. The mode wasn't making money for Blizzard and the Firestone stats show it's abysmal player count so I can understand the reasoning to remove it, just can't accept it 😭💔
I always buy my 6 links on the trade site just to avoid 6 linking myself. This is a great QoF change! Might try the manual linking next league to test the change for myself
Regular quests had the problem that they were very hard to balance: you had to play with effectively one card less, which is a big drawback, but at the end there was a reward that would give you a huge advantage for the rest of the game. So there was a very narrow window between the quest being too hard to complete and the quest being oppressive.
Questlines solved part of that with their intermediate rewards, but they kept the big and permanent rewards for completion, so as a result they were just as oppressive as quests when they worked, but they also worked much more often. I think the solution is not to go back to regular quests, but to go further away from them, by having less impactful final rewards.
If you look at excavate, the final reward is powerful, but not a win condition in itself, except for the Snake before it got nerfed. Also the excavate reward is used up, instead of providing a permanent boost for the rest of the game. Looking at the original quests, The Last Kaleidosaur never became a problem, even as it became easier to complete over time in Wild, because the reward is a one-time thing that doesn't instantly win the game.
Non-permanent rewards are not the only option though: the original set of hero cards had the same problem as quests where the permanent reward in the form of a new hero power would dominate the game and make many games feel the same. Recent hero cards have shifted some of the power from the hero power to the battlecry and as a result have been much better received.
I noticed there are no Demon Hunter decks in the list. I've had unexpected success with Big Demon DH; small sample size but I've beaten several of the meta decks in this article. According to HSReplay the matchup against Druid is pretty bad, but if you're not facing a lot of Druids it could be an option.
It's a weird deck: it is relatively slow and its power comes from cheating out big minions, but the way it wins is by dealing face damage over multiple turns without requiring your big board to stick.
I'll switch to e-mail style quoting as well, as the formatted quotes are a pain to edit.
> I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
I think in this case "maintenance pressure" doesn't mean it's too hard, just that it eats up developer hours, which cost money. If so, both your and their explanation are different ways to describe the same problem. Apparently Duels wasn't being played enough to make it worth investing those hours there instead of elsewhere in the game.
Destiny 2 infamously removed content from the game because of "hard drive space" with no optional way to get it back.
Removing content is never popular with players, both from a personal perspective and from a preservation perspective. Despite that, it happens very regularly. I think they'll just wait until players get detached enough from their Mercenaries collection that they won't be as upset when it goes poof.
At least with Mercenaries, the lore impact is low, as most of the lore building was done with the Book of Heroes mini-adventures, which can remain in the game even if the Mercenaries mode disappears. From what I understand of the Destiny 2 situation (never played it, but I watch SkillUp's videos sometimes), there is important lore in the removed content that is now completely inaccessible to new players.
If Blizzard wanted to take the smarter approach here, and make some new tech, maybe they could make Mercenaries an optional download (it's a lot of data, images, code) which would slim down the mobile install of the game.
An optional download would be a great solution, but I don't expect them to implement this unless they get the feature almost for free because they already have the infrastructure. Hearthstone has some live content download support, but it still requires frequent client upgrades, so the system probably has some limitations.
Note that for apps on Apple's mobile store, it is forbidden to download executable code, probably as a measure to avoid code bypassing review. Therefore they could only make the data an optional download. As data is generally much larger than code, that wouldn't impact the goal of having a smaller download/install footprint all that much though.
I am so thrilled to have never sunk time into another MMO during the early "WoW killer" days. Played all the betas, always went back to the real crack dealer and it looks like I wasn't wrong for doing so. It's not even that all those games were bad, some of them had great stuff in them, but they all ended up lacking content at the end of the day.
The same still applies to modern live service games: even the ones that are good at launch struggle to provide enough content to retain players. To wean players off a game they're already invested in, the new game has to provide a much better experience than the old game; there is a huge barrier to entry.
And that's my problem with battle passes. I know I'm not the target audience for a lot of games, I don't have the time like I used to, but damn do I hate how battle passes feel so essential to the experience. I like having some cool stuff and games and it seems like the coolest always comes from the passes and they just take such a massive time commitment to finish. If I had a dollar for every battle pass I haven't finished, I'd be able to buy a few more battle passes.
Players spend more money in games that they spend more time in, so it makes business sense for companies to try and make players spend as much time as possible in their live service game. The battle pass is a way to buy player loyalty that the player is paying for; it's no wonder companies like them. But by optimizing the monetization of each individual game in this way, the market for live service games as a whole becomes worse, because players have no time left to play multiple games.
Isn't it insane how you can fire a dozen people, screw over the game hard enough to require cuts, but when you look at the overall picture if they cost the company 1.5 million a year and the game profits 50 million (totally making up numbers here) that higher ups see that as a positive savings?
The problem is that investors expect not just profits, but growing profits, which is not sustainable. This is a wider problem and I think it will take a lot of time and probably a few collapses before people will learn to be satisfied with just steady profits instead of expecting exponential growth in every market.
Investment in game studios was one of the worst things to happen to the industry.
Yes and no. Without investments, good AAA games like Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't be possible either.
Ah man, I play so much Duels. Finally hitting that spell heavy run with the orb making things cheap feels so satisfying. Back in the day, I had a broken DH run with Double Time and a bag of coins that did 40 damage by turn 2 - first 12 and 0 run I ever had.
Not sure where Blizz will put the resources but Duels did become a hassle on the backend as they kept adding in every set for some evil combinations. Oh well, guess I will never get that 12 win Diablo run…
I could be wrong on this but honestly a decent chunk of questlines being poorly received is more of a power level issue and with the rate of balance updates recently I don't think it will ever get to the point where they were at beforehand. I think that labeling the entire mechanic as a mistake is a bit hasty when just the standalone quests were pretty well received both times.
As for the comparison with Excavate, I think each method of 'play a bunch of cards leading towards a big reward' has some merit over the other. Personally, I'm more of a fan of knowing what the rewards for each step are going to be so I can plan around it more. There's also the fact that questlines do a much better job at telling a narrative, which while not as important now, for a year filled with 10 different characters all with their own special story to tell, having actual cards in the set that tell the story is pretty huge. Meanwhile Excavate has been much healthier in the metagame (partly because most of them were pretty lackluster and had to be buffed to start seeing play but that's besides the point) and the fact that less of the deck has to be dedicated to a theme helps make it more of a package of cards that can be fit into a wider variety of decks. If Excavate is the way Blizzard wants to push forwards in the "mechanics that require you to jump through hoops to get a powerful payoff" camp then I'm happy with it, just that I wish there could be some way to incorporate a story into the expansion the way questlines did.
Oh also as one quick last side note, talking about repeating mistakes of the past instead of moving forward is pretty funny considering the fact that on numerous occasions balancing has fallen into the same pitfalls time and time again with stuff like cost reduction. I'm sure that the HS team is going to continue to repeat mistakes every once in a while, regardless of whether questlines return or not.
Perhaps unsurprising. Duels have been in the rut for quite a time now, perhaps since they practically killed the bucket system and every game progressively gets greedier to the point that post 7 wins is almost always a value matchup.
Judging by the queue times, its likely that the mode doesnt really see much attention at all. I pretty much drop duels the moment they changed the bucket system and havent looked back. But once a while I drop in (usually to complete quests etc.) and find myself waiting minutes to get a match and even one loss puts me further down the waiting time queue. Got to the point that I just didnt want to bother.
As to why they decided to remove the mode entirely? If I have to speculate its very likely because unlike mercs and classic mode, you cant realistically keep it static. It'll have to have at least some form of attention even if its nothing more than merely switching the expansions around every 4 months.
Classic could also make a decent Twist for a month. I'm surprised they haven't done that yet.
This would have been such an easy thing for them to do for the "off season" that is happening right now for January before they bring in some new goodies for February. They could have done Classic + Naxx and it would have been a great way to kick off the year.
My guess is that they already have a plan to drop Mercenaries from the client and are just waiting a while to announce it
Removing paid content like that from players, especially in a card game, would be a huge slap in the face. If they offered refunds to BattleNet balance or just an equivalent in other Hearthstone stuff, I could see them being able to do it with less friction, but they have to take a loss in order to do it. I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
Destiny 2 infamously removed content from the game because of "hard drive space" with no optional way to get it back. If Blizzard wanted to take the smarter approach here, and make some new tech, maybe they could make Mercenaries an optional download (it's a lot of data, images, code) which would slim down the mobile install of the game.
One reason I don't see them doing that though is the people who will ask the same for Battlegrounds, but Battlegrounds being an active mode needs to be baseline for the ease of access, and because there's that 1% chance someone who doesn't care about it goes and plays it once because it was easy to do so and they end up spending money on it.
In a way though, I'd like to be wrong about that. Mercenaries has so much stuff in the client, it would certainly make all our datamining processes quicker without it there. But I'd rather it stay because I know people that still like to play it and I think that's awesome.
Live service games in general are having a hard time: a combination of the market being saturated, player preferences changing and rising costs.
Oh yeah, I feel bad for the new model of games. It used to be that you'd launch a game, provide some support for it, and then it was done and you were either a great game or a bad game. But now everything from AAA needs multiplayer, needs a battle pass, needs microtransctions (even in single player games), and it just all feels so predatory. It forces everyone to stick to regular content releases which in some cases can lead to lower quality updates in games (honestly a lot of early PUBG felt lower quality and updating for the sake of updating).
Then you add in how players change overtime? Oof.
It reminds me of the time when every few months another "WoW killer" was announced and few lived beyond the initial hype.
I am so thrilled to have never sunk time into another MMO during the early "WoW killer" days. Played all the betas, always went back to the real crack dealer and it looks like I wasn't wrong for doing so. It's not even that all those games were bad, some of them had great stuff in them, but they all ended up lacking content at the end of the day.
There is only so much space for games that require a lot of time investment;
And that's my problem with battle passes. I know I'm not the target audience for a lot of games, I don't have the time like I used to, but damn do I hate how battle passes feel so essential to the experience. I like having some cool stuff and games and it seems like the coolest always comes from the passes and they just take such a massive time commitment to finish. If I had a dollar for every battle pass I haven't finished, I'd be able to buy a few more battle passes.
What I think happened is that they fired a number of developers last year to cut costs and now they have to make cuts in the stuff they can deliver because they're short-staffed.
Isn't it insane how you can fire a dozen people, screw over the game hard enough to require cuts, but when you look at the overall picture if they cost the company 1.5 million a year and the game profits 50 million (totally making up numbers here) that higher ups see that as a positive savings? Everything always comes down to penny pinching in AAA because of the investors. Investment in game studios was one of the worst things to happen to the industry. Investment as a whole has ruined a lot of businesses and the quality of service they deliver to customers, I remember when you could get someone who actually spoke English on the physical phone with Amazon, but that's a topic for another time.
Duel treasures in arena could be fun, if the entry fee wasn't still 150 gold. No one will go and play that anymore than they do now, very well it might result in the opposite if it makes Arena even more lopsided. I don't know why they haven't made any attempts to alter the entry fee over the years. I guess so they can claim that there is too few Arena players to be worth putting money into developing that game mode. Would track with them shutting down all these other game modes, so Arena is just surviving cause it is being ignored. Ironic.
A return to questlines would not be well-received by the player base. There is no question in my mind about this. If you want to play them again, either go to Wild or wait for them to come up in Twist.
Even reading this stroll down Questline memory lane almost makes my blood boil, as the fundamental design was so obviously bad for the game (as were so many things that happened under Ayala).
If you agree that Excavate is a better way to handle the basic idea behind Questlines, why not just hope for more of that? What is this inclination to repeat mistakes of the past instead of moving forward?
Regis has been openly antagonistic toward Blizzard (in his diplomatic, affable Regis way) for a very long time now. I don't think either party would consider it to be the end of the world if they just decide to go their separate ways.
It would be a huge loss to the community to have a positive force like Regis being completely gone from the game.
Regis is fantastic when he's having fun. But when he's not having fun, that also shows in his work and I just feel sorry for the guy, as he's such a likable character. So I hope that he's able to find fun in Hearthstone in the future, but doesn't stick with the game when he cannot.
The loss of Classic was tragic, though they should have accelerated the timeline of era releases instead of never touching it. Classic makes a good Tavern Brawl though, and works way better as a "this shows up as a 1 week thing" occasionally instead of being permanently available.
Classic could also make a decent Twist for a month. I'm surprised they haven't done that yet.
Mercenaries was another huge loss, the mode had a lot of potential but failed to deliver in so many ways. Mercenaries would be removed from the client too if it wasn't for the simple fact they actually sold players content for the mode.
Mercenaries is in kind of the opposite situation as Duels: because it shares almost nothing with other modes, it takes up a lot of space in download and installation, but it also doesn't require much maintenance because no changes to shared resources can break it.
My guess is that they already have a plan to drop Mercenaries from the client and are just waiting a while to announce it, to soften the blow to people who put a lot of time and/or money into it.
What happened to Hearthstone being this platform for so many different ways to play with the game? (...)
We used to get some great viewership on Duels content. The mode was clearly doing well at different points, but maybe it just wasn't doing good enough for Activision.
Live service games in general are having a hard time: a combination of the market being saturated, player preferences changing and rising costs. It reminds me of the time when every few months another "WoW killer" was announced and few lived beyond the initial hype. There is only so much space for games that require a lot of time investment; the fact that one game is successful doesn't mean that a similar game will bring similar success.
What I think happened is that they fired a number of developers last year to cut costs and now they have to make cuts in the stuff they can deliver because they're short-staffed.
I mean, even Mercenaries (as much as I love this mode) is still in the client. Are they going to keep it because of pve and are going to disable pvp there too in the future?
Mercs cannot be removed from the client because people paid money for their Mercs collections, which cannot be used without the Mercs client. In contrast, any cards used in Duels are from Hearthstone proper and are therefore still usable without Duels.
(Technically, I'm sure the EULA says they are within their rights to remove Mercs, but they won't do it because it would generate too much ill will.)
mindzq
That sounds amazing. Besides, I want to invite you to play rainbow friends with me. This great horror game features two chapters.
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Shaman, Warlock, & Warrior Quests
Something I dislike about Raid the Docks is that a single card negates the main weakness of a deck, in this case that aggro decks eventually run out of steam.
Odyn, Prime Designate has the same problem: normally, a control deck would either have to dedicate multiple card slots to a win condition or assemble a win condition from discovered cards, but this one card solves that weakness.
Similarly, Deathstalker Rexxar, while one of my favorite cards, was rightly criticized for giving any Hunter deck a decent late game for the minimal investment of a single card slot.
bayand
Choose among four game modes. This shell shockers shooting game offers four game modes with different playing rules.
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Shaman, Warlock, & Warrior Quests
Power level was definitely part of the problem, but because they were powerful, they saw a lot of play and therefore the other problems questlines had were much more noticeable. Nobody was calling for Bloodreaver Gul'dan to be nerfed when he came out, despite it being one of the best hero cards of the set; the calls for a nerf only started once Warlock got strong cards in a later set that brought it back into the meta. Today, nobody is calling for Orion, Mansion Manager to be nerfed despite it being an absolutely infuriating card to play against.
I think the biggest issue was that questlines (and regular quests and hero cards before them) made many games feel the same. As I wrote in another reply above, I think that's mostly due to the rewards and in particular the completion rewards, not the questline mechanic itself.
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
Very sad to see Blizzard are completely removing the mode from the client. Not sure why they can't treat it the same as Mercenaries but the client is getting quite cumbersome I guess. The mode wasn't making money for Blizzard and the Firestone stats show it's abysmal player count so I can understand the reasoning to remove it, just can't accept it 😭💔
Orb of Fusing Quality of Life Updates Coming as Early as Path of Exile's Next League
I always buy my 6 links on the trade site just to avoid 6 linking myself. This is a great QoF change! Might try the manual linking next league to test the change for myself
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Shaman, Warlock, & Warrior Quests
Regular quests had the problem that they were very hard to balance: you had to play with effectively one card less, which is a big drawback, but at the end there was a reward that would give you a huge advantage for the rest of the game. So there was a very narrow window between the quest being too hard to complete and the quest being oppressive.
Questlines solved part of that with their intermediate rewards, but they kept the big and permanent rewards for completion, so as a result they were just as oppressive as quests when they worked, but they also worked much more often. I think the solution is not to go back to regular quests, but to go further away from them, by having less impactful final rewards.
If you look at excavate, the final reward is powerful, but not a win condition in itself, except for the Snake before it got nerfed. Also the excavate reward is used up, instead of providing a permanent boost for the rest of the game. Looking at the original quests, The Last Kaleidosaur never became a problem, even as it became easier to complete over time in Wild, because the reward is a one-time thing that doesn't instantly win the game.
Non-permanent rewards are not the only option though: the original set of hero cards had the same problem as quests where the permanent reward in the form of a new hero power would dominate the game and make many games feel the same. Recent hero cards have shifted some of the power from the hero power to the battlecry and as a result have been much better received.
Top Hearthstone Decks to Play to Kickoff 2024 - Climb That Standard Rank!
I noticed there are no Demon Hunter decks in the list. I've had unexpected success with Big Demon DH; small sample size but I've beaten several of the meta decks in this article. According to HSReplay the matchup against Druid is pretty bad, but if you're not facing a lot of Druids it could be an option.
It's a weird deck: it is relatively slow and its power comes from cheating out big minions, but the way it wins is by dealing face damage over multiple turns without requiring your big board to stick.
Snowpocalypse 4
Snow Owl with its snowball - you are welcome
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
I'll switch to e-mail style quoting as well, as the formatted quotes are a pain to edit.
> I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
I think in this case "maintenance pressure" doesn't mean it's too hard, just that it eats up developer hours, which cost money. If so, both your and their explanation are different ways to describe the same problem. Apparently Duels wasn't being played enough to make it worth investing those hours there instead of elsewhere in the game.
Removing content is never popular with players, both from a personal perspective and from a preservation perspective. Despite that, it happens very regularly. I think they'll just wait until players get detached enough from their Mercenaries collection that they won't be as upset when it goes poof.
At least with Mercenaries, the lore impact is low, as most of the lore building was done with the Book of Heroes mini-adventures, which can remain in the game even if the Mercenaries mode disappears. From what I understand of the Destiny 2 situation (never played it, but I watch SkillUp's videos sometimes), there is important lore in the removed content that is now completely inaccessible to new players.
An optional download would be a great solution, but I don't expect them to implement this unless they get the feature almost for free because they already have the infrastructure. Hearthstone has some live content download support, but it still requires frequent client upgrades, so the system probably has some limitations.
Note that for apps on Apple's mobile store, it is forbidden to download executable code, probably as a measure to avoid code bypassing review. Therefore they could only make the data an optional download. As data is generally much larger than code, that wouldn't impact the goal of having a smaller download/install footprint all that much though.
The same still applies to modern live service games: even the ones that are good at launch struggle to provide enough content to retain players. To wean players off a game they're already invested in, the new game has to provide a much better experience than the old game; there is a huge barrier to entry.
Players spend more money in games that they spend more time in, so it makes business sense for companies to try and make players spend as much time as possible in their live service game. The battle pass is a way to buy player loyalty that the player is paying for; it's no wonder companies like them. But by optimizing the monetization of each individual game in this way, the market for live service games as a whole becomes worse, because players have no time left to play multiple games.
The problem is that investors expect not just profits, but growing profits, which is not sustainable. This is a wider problem and I think it will take a lot of time and probably a few collapses before people will learn to be satisfied with just steady profits instead of expecting exponential growth in every market.
Yes and no. Without investments, good AAA games like Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't be possible either.
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
Ah man, I play so much Duels. Finally hitting that spell heavy run with the orb making things cheap feels so satisfying. Back in the day, I had a broken DH run with Double Time and a bag of coins that did 40 damage by turn 2 - first 12 and 0 run I ever had.
Not sure where Blizz will put the resources but Duels did become a hassle on the backend as they kept adding in every set for some evil combinations. Oh well, guess I will never get that 12 win Diablo run…
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Shaman, Warlock, & Warrior Quests
I could be wrong on this but honestly a decent chunk of questlines being poorly received is more of a power level issue and with the rate of balance updates recently I don't think it will ever get to the point where they were at beforehand. I think that labeling the entire mechanic as a mistake is a bit hasty when just the standalone quests were pretty well received both times.
As for the comparison with Excavate, I think each method of 'play a bunch of cards leading towards a big reward' has some merit over the other. Personally, I'm more of a fan of knowing what the rewards for each step are going to be so I can plan around it more. There's also the fact that questlines do a much better job at telling a narrative, which while not as important now, for a year filled with 10 different characters all with their own special story to tell, having actual cards in the set that tell the story is pretty huge. Meanwhile Excavate has been much healthier in the metagame (partly because most of them were pretty lackluster and had to be buffed to start seeing play but that's besides the point) and the fact that less of the deck has to be dedicated to a theme helps make it more of a package of cards that can be fit into a wider variety of decks. If Excavate is the way Blizzard wants to push forwards in the "mechanics that require you to jump through hoops to get a powerful payoff" camp then I'm happy with it, just that I wish there could be some way to incorporate a story into the expansion the way questlines did.
Oh also as one quick last side note, talking about repeating mistakes of the past instead of moving forward is pretty funny considering the fact that on numerous occasions balancing has fallen into the same pitfalls time and time again with stuff like cost reduction. I'm sure that the HS team is going to continue to repeat mistakes every once in a while, regardless of whether questlines return or not.
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
Perhaps unsurprising. Duels have been in the rut for quite a time now, perhaps since they practically killed the bucket system and every game progressively gets greedier to the point that post 7 wins is almost always a value matchup.
Judging by the queue times, its likely that the mode doesnt really see much attention at all. I pretty much drop duels the moment they changed the bucket system and havent looked back. But once a while I drop in (usually to complete quests etc.) and find myself waiting minutes to get a match and even one loss puts me further down the waiting time queue. Got to the point that I just didnt want to bother.
As to why they decided to remove the mode entirely? If I have to speculate its very likely because unlike mercs and classic mode, you cant realistically keep it static. It'll have to have at least some form of attention even if its nothing more than merely switching the expansions around every 4 months.
luciasmith561
Sounds amazing. Do you want to play gorilla tag with me? This is a great game.
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Shaman, Warlock, & Warrior Quests
Perhaps we should just go back to regular quests.
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Shaman, Warlock, & Warrior Quests
For the love of God, please no
The Daily Epic Games Giveaway Continues With Ghostwire Tokyo - Claim It In the Next 24 Hours
Yeah I'm replying
Yeah!
The Daily Epic Games Giveaway Continues With Ghostwire Tokyo - Claim It In the Next 24 Hours
Just a test
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
I love it, lots of quotes! Let's dive in.
This would have been such an easy thing for them to do for the "off season" that is happening right now for January before they bring in some new goodies for February. They could have done Classic + Naxx and it would have been a great way to kick off the year.
Removing paid content like that from players, especially in a card game, would be a huge slap in the face. If they offered refunds to BattleNet balance or just an equivalent in other Hearthstone stuff, I could see them being able to do it with less friction, but they have to take a loss in order to do it. I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
Destiny 2 infamously removed content from the game because of "hard drive space" with no optional way to get it back. If Blizzard wanted to take the smarter approach here, and make some new tech, maybe they could make Mercenaries an optional download (it's a lot of data, images, code) which would slim down the mobile install of the game.
One reason I don't see them doing that though is the people who will ask the same for Battlegrounds, but Battlegrounds being an active mode needs to be baseline for the ease of access, and because there's that 1% chance someone who doesn't care about it goes and plays it once because it was easy to do so and they end up spending money on it.
In a way though, I'd like to be wrong about that. Mercenaries has so much stuff in the client, it would certainly make all our datamining processes quicker without it there. But I'd rather it stay because I know people that still like to play it and I think that's awesome.
Oh yeah, I feel bad for the new model of games. It used to be that you'd launch a game, provide some support for it, and then it was done and you were either a great game or a bad game. But now everything from AAA needs multiplayer, needs a battle pass, needs microtransctions (even in single player games), and it just all feels so predatory. It forces everyone to stick to regular content releases which in some cases can lead to lower quality updates in games (honestly a lot of early PUBG felt lower quality and updating for the sake of updating).
Then you add in how players change overtime? Oof.
I am so thrilled to have never sunk time into another MMO during the early "WoW killer" days. Played all the betas, always went back to the real crack dealer and it looks like I wasn't wrong for doing so. It's not even that all those games were bad, some of them had great stuff in them, but they all ended up lacking content at the end of the day.
And that's my problem with battle passes. I know I'm not the target audience for a lot of games, I don't have the time like I used to, but damn do I hate how battle passes feel so essential to the experience. I like having some cool stuff and games and it seems like the coolest always comes from the passes and they just take such a massive time commitment to finish. If I had a dollar for every battle pass I haven't finished, I'd be able to buy a few more battle passes.
Isn't it insane how you can fire a dozen people, screw over the game hard enough to require cuts, but when you look at the overall picture if they cost the company 1.5 million a year and the game profits 50 million (totally making up numbers here) that higher ups see that as a positive savings? Everything always comes down to penny pinching in AAA because of the investors. Investment in game studios was one of the worst things to happen to the industry. Investment as a whole has ruined a lot of businesses and the quality of service they deliver to customers, I remember when you could get someone who actually spoke English on the physical phone with Amazon, but that's a topic for another time.
Thanks for the reply!
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
Duel treasures in arena could be fun, if the entry fee wasn't still 150 gold. No one will go and play that anymore than they do now, very well it might result in the opposite if it makes Arena even more lopsided. I don't know why they haven't made any attempts to alter the entry fee over the years. I guess so they can claim that there is too few Arena players to be worth putting money into developing that game mode. Would track with them shutting down all these other game modes, so Arena is just surviving cause it is being ignored. Ironic.
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Shaman, Warlock, & Warrior Quests
A return to questlines would not be well-received by the player base. There is no question in my mind about this. If you want to play them again, either go to Wild or wait for them to come up in Twist.
Even reading this stroll down Questline memory lane almost makes my blood boil, as the fundamental design was so obviously bad for the game (as were so many things that happened under Ayala).
If you agree that Excavate is a better way to handle the basic idea behind Questlines, why not just hope for more of that? What is this inclination to repeat mistakes of the past instead of moving forward?
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
Regis has been openly antagonistic toward Blizzard (in his diplomatic, affable Regis way) for a very long time now. I don't think either party would consider it to be the end of the world if they just decide to go their separate ways.
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
Regis is fantastic when he's having fun. But when he's not having fun, that also shows in his work and I just feel sorry for the guy, as he's such a likable character. So I hope that he's able to find fun in Hearthstone in the future, but doesn't stick with the game when he cannot.
Classic could also make a decent Twist for a month. I'm surprised they haven't done that yet.
Mercenaries is in kind of the opposite situation as Duels: because it shares almost nothing with other modes, it takes up a lot of space in download and installation, but it also doesn't require much maintenance because no changes to shared resources can break it.
My guess is that they already have a plan to drop Mercenaries from the client and are just waiting a while to announce it, to soften the blow to people who put a lot of time and/or money into it.
Live service games in general are having a hard time: a combination of the market being saturated, player preferences changing and rising costs. It reminds me of the time when every few months another "WoW killer" was announced and few lived beyond the initial hype. There is only so much space for games that require a lot of time investment; the fact that one game is successful doesn't mean that a similar game will bring similar success.
What I think happened is that they fired a number of developers last year to cut costs and now they have to make cuts in the stuff they can deliver because they're short-staffed.
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
Mercs cannot be removed from the client because people paid money for their Mercs collections, which cannot be used without the Mercs client. In contrast, any cards used in Duels are from Hearthstone proper and are therefore still usable without Duels.
(Technically, I'm sure the EULA says they are within their rights to remove Mercs, but they won't do it because it would generate too much ill will.)
Hearthstone Duels is Being Removed From the Client in April 2024
RIP Duels.
At least we still have Twist, and that mode has a lot of potential. It's just not up right now unfortunately.