I think they should have nerfed Lightray and The Garden's Grace instead of Order in the Court. Alternatively they could change the mechanics so cards that reduce their own cost will also be cheaper in the deck and not just in hand. Then Order in the Court could shuffle Lightray to the bottom of your deck.
It would create an interesting decision for when to play OitC. You could play it early to put Lightray/The Garden's Grace towards the top of your deck, but you lose tempo and will have dead draws for a few turns.
Blindeye Sharpshooter:... Uh what? Is this supposed to be a nerf? The problem is that it can OTK you on like turns 3-4. This change does NOTHING to change the "feels bad" part of the card. It only makes it easier to clear, IF you somehow survive. This nerf changes nothing from what i can tell. I really was expecting at least a +1 mana nerf.
Always a Bigger Jormungar: Great change. This makes it harder to draw, since Trinket Tracker doesn't tutor it anymore. And it costing 2 mana makes it harder to combo with the cleave minions, which often slows down the deck. I.m.o. it's a good thing that this deck got nerfed, because it punished minion based strategies and promoted OTK/Kill from in hand strategies. Board should matter, and this nerf makes board based decks better again.
Order in the Court: Removing the draw makes it so it's not re-order your deck + free instant Lightray or The Garden's Grace. Instead you will now only get the consistancy. Which is still a great thing. Reminder that Lorekeeper Polkelt was basically in every paladin deck because of the provided consistancy. Even after polkelt was nerfed to 5 mana, paladin still used it. Order in the Court will continue to see play regardless. TLDR: It will be a bit weaker, but will continue to see play in pretty much every paladin deck because it makes the decks consistant.
Defense Attorney Nathanos: Interesting change. Making it synergise better with the current deathrattles is a nice buff. However i'm not certain if this makes any change. Nathanos will rotate next expansion, so in terms of Standard this will only be relevant for this expansion + mini set. Soo it only has a very limited time in the spotlight, and honestly i don't think this buff will change anything. I feel like Highlander hunter also still has plenty of better plays around that mana range, so unless deathrattle hunter gets pushed hard in the mini-set i'm not sure if this will see play.
The Azerite Snake: Honestly i thought they were gonna go "Deal 10 damage to your opponent. Gain health equal to the damage dealth." with the nerf, but seeing only 3 damage go away is a bit dissapointing. You now need to play this 5 times instead of 3 times in order to kill your opponent. I'm a bit dissapointed with this nerf, because i feel like the excavate package was supposed to be a control package instead of a combo package. And this change makes it so it continues to be a combo deck that feels horrible to play against. At least we now have a bigger window to outdamage their "healing" during their bounces.
Kinda surprised Crusader Aura didn't get hit, because it really feels like an outlier. (Seriously why did paladin get a 4 mana Bloodlust that lasts 3 turns and ALSO gives +1 health buff?!?)
Overall i'm not that excited about this wave of nerfs. I.m.o only 2/5 changes feel good. (Order and Jormungar) But luckely this is just based on early outliers. (Still surprised Aura isn't an outlier) So late next week we hopefully have some changes based on more data, and thus more potential nerfs. Personally i do enjoy the meta when i'm not playing against paladin, so lets hope the post-nerf meta will be even more fun!
I'm going to respectfully disagree. Most of the games I've won with this deck have been due to a single, huge pop-off turn, making the health irrelevant. More often than not, I play Blindeye Sharpshooter for only 2 mana thanks to Load the Chamber. A mana-cost nerf would have been more impactful.
I will also share that I have won a few games by playing Blindeye Sharpshooter on turn 3 and having it live due to its health, and I've also had a few games where the pop-off turn wasn't quite lethal, but my opponent couldn't remove it, so I got to go again. In these cases, yes, the health nerf definitely makes a difference. These scenarios are few and far between though.
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and plans in so much detail! There’s certainly a lot to look forward to.
One thing I’d like to note is that I never meant to ask you to share site visitor or add revenue stats. I only mentioned those bulletpoints to make it clear that I’m aware of the fact that there’s a ton of stuff to take into consideration and the general public doesn’t know anything about it.
Again: Thank you very much to sticking to the quality over quantity approach and building this awesome community. I can’t wait to see what’s next
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Very tame standard nerfs overall, kinda reminds me of the small nerfs they did back in the day. Just slight adjustments and probably won't make much of a difference. Least the nerf to Azerite Snake will delay the bouncing combo quite a bit but I'm sure these archetypes will remain quite strong. I did hear we may be getting another balance patch later next week if things don't change at all.
Its only a brilliant nerf if the idea is to keep its essential power level but disallowing a naked sharpshooter on 3 turn, which to be fair happens rarely anyway.
I think team5 wants to monitor this a bit more before removing its viability. Its a cool new thing for dhunter and its a new expansion they'd probably want to avoid killing it early.
But with regards to what the deck was already doing, it'll continue doing it, which I get is not exactly what the community wants or expected.
I'll be the first to say it: this was the correct nerf for Blindeye Sharpshooter. This is what I'd call an "invisible nerf". It's not something you the opponent will ever notice. However, this does mean that Blindeye Sharpshooter is now completely useless outside of the combo turn. You cannot play it on the board preemptively, which slows down the Demon Hunter and gives them a dead draw in the early game, which in turn opens them up to aggro decks, which in turn reduces the deck's overall winrate and thus playrate.
I think that's a brilliant change. Nerfing the effect would've just killed the card and also killed the archetype, while this way the deck can exist in a more fair state.
Also lower health can be important in rare cases of things like Hunter Secrets that can damage minion why being played.
Guan Yu Uther looks so good. It's just a shame it doesn't have custom animations even tho in hero selection it implies it's a premium skin since it has a full artwork.
I'll be the first to say it: this was the correct nerf for Blindeye Sharpshooter. This is what I'd call an "invisible nerf". It's not something you the opponent will ever notice. However, this does mean that Blindeye Sharpshooter is now completely useless outside of the combo turn. You cannot play it on the board preemptively, which slows down the Demon Hunter and gives them a dead draw in the early game, which in turn opens them up to aggro decks, which in turn reduces the deck's overall winrate and thus playrate.
I think that's a brilliant change. Nerfing the effect would've just killed the card and also killed the archetype, while this way the deck can exist in a more fair state.
Realistically, we can't be a Hearthstone-only site. Even look at the biggest Hearthstone sites online, they aren't getting the traffic they once did and by extension they are not doing great. Larger companies are keeping them around because it's worth having the property in your portfolio, and not because it's necessarily very profitable. Look at our old home - I'm not saying we've done a super good job recently, but they've been quite a bit late to some reveals, they also can go many days at a time without posting anything particularly interesting. They don't have anyone properly paying attention to that site.
Yes, our primary folks visiting and interacting are still Hearthstone, but we are seeing more traction as time goes on and as we try new things for the "games" side of the site. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is Out of Games. The end vision is to continue supporting Hearthstone for many years to come and to have more than that too.
One of the most difficult things to do is to get people to sign up for your website. "Why do I need another account". This problem ultimately needs to be solved and we need to find good reasons for people to join our community and good places to promote the fact they can sign up - a lot of sites these days seem to not have registration systems and instead exist just to farm pageviews with crappy seo content - fun! Leveraging our community-focused side of the site to bring more people in is going to be a big thing going forward.
but it doesn't look like it works out so far
I don't disagree with you. I'm not particularly happy about it and it can certainly be a demotivator at times, but on the flip side it increases the drive to try new stuff. We're trying to push more content through social media, and new ways to engage with people, which has been working more this month and I've been happy to see some of that result in more site traffic.
Written media is on a decline, and it really pisses me off. It's difficult to hold people's attention because it isn't a 15 second TikTok clip with robovoice. Video is currently the king of content online and through those platforms, so not your own platform, you can build an audience. But, does that translate well to your own site? Not really.
On the social media side, man. There's your video social (YouTube, TikTok, Facebook/Instagram Reels) and your traditional link social (Twitter, Facebook) and Twitter is feeling like it is less and less worth it with them changing their algorithm to make discovery harder. Facebook, if you aren't paying them money, they aren't sending you viewers anymore. Then the video stuff, if you focus on video, now we're no longer focusing on our written side of the site.
Where else can you promote your website? Reddit... and Discords. Sharing your content on Discord servers though is varied and may not be allowed in a lot of places. Reddit is similar with every subreddit having a different rule set. Promoting your own content outside of organic google traffic is just harder than it once was. We also have a team that doesn't like promoting their own great content on sites like reddit, which you kinda need everyone to promote their own content instead of one person promoting all the content, just due to the way those places work, which could be some nice additional traffic.
actual visitor stats
I don't think we've ever really showcased our traffic stats? We've done a few infographics at the end of the year to showcase the community, but other than that, traffic stats haven't been public - though please do correct me if I'm wrong. Sites generally don't make that information available to the public as competition can more easily see what works and let's them copycat more easily.
We showcase view metrics on user-created content because people like to see how well their content is doing compared to everyone else, and it serves as a good metric, outside of votes, for people to sort content by to find good stuff.
add revenue stats
Similarly to traffic stats, this is private information. The vast majority of our site staff don't have access to this information and instead, they get to see a more general view of our ups and downs in traffic. One could certainly put some pieces together to figure out a rough guess of what the site makes, and maybe someone on staff has but hasn't said anything about it, but yeah, that's something we're likely to keep private.
What I will say, is the site is a money hole and I haven't been full time on it for a couple of years because I've been working full-time. I wish it wasn't the case because it has clearly had a large impact on the site, but running the site without ads for a good portion of the early days pulled us into a bad position for sustainability and we've been playing catch-up since. I haven't said anything about it in public because the last thing I wanted to do was cause alarm bells to ring and people leave the site because it didn't look like I was a big part of it anymore. Nope, I still am, just not the 10-12 hours a day I used to be. I could have also made some smarter decisions with our infrastructure costs, which are now greatly reduced vs our early days. Covid also fucked us pretty hard for a variety of reasons and I lost a ton of money from that. Oh joy!
discord
Discord, honestly, has never been a big priority for me. Discord is chaos, and if anything, takes away from the site itself. Insightful conversations on Discord are lost immediately because people won't be able to reliably find them in the future. I'm quite against Discord for that reason, so much good information is being locked behind joining Discord servers.
staff members
It's difficult to find quality additions for our team. I want people that will treat it seriously and have the time to help us push great content every single day and have multiple hours they can dedicated to the cause. I love our folks that don't have that kind of time anymore too because we get some genuinely good stuff from it and without a healthy mix of the two, I don't think you end up with as good of a product. The biggest issue though is people want to get paid and if your traffic isn't great, there's not a huge sell to working on the site when everything is revenue sharing based.
We don't have an unlimited budget because we're independant. I've had several offers throughout the years to buy the site which could have injected large amounts of capital into it, but then I lose control of it and I don't know how new ownership would feel in a year from then or even a month. Out of Games will always be independant, it just means the growth is slower.
plans for the site
Earlier in the year I talked about us being close to shipping a site update. We were! We were quite close to pushing it but changes kept creeping in and deadlines were missed and then heavy news cycles took away attention (and irl responsibilities too) and so that update never got pushed. Since then, a lot has changed with our big site update and I've got a few bits that still need to be styled before we can push it out.
I'll talk a little bit about expectations.
The forums as they are currently known are getting destroyed - however I use that word incorrectly because all the content is being preserved. I love the forums, I love forums in general; I love being able to chronologically look at the way people are having a conversation. Forums don't work for our site anymore. Every game will, going forward, have it's own "forum" and each of those "forums" will have the ability to tag topics so that they can be filtered. You want to look at Card Discussion? Click on the topic tag for it!
One big problem our forums have always had is having all the content spaced out into so many different sections. There may have been conversations happening in half a dozen different forums this hour, but going to each of those forums, they effectively look dead. People don't want to be a part of a discussion place that looks dead.
Portals. I mean, Realms. Games exist as a Realm on the site. Much like how today you can go to our Hearthstone Portal, there will instead be a Hearthstone Realm which will put our curated content at the forefront and the community's content alongside it.
Maybe we don't need to cover a thing about Hearthstone Esports because someone has made a really good thread for it and people are already talking about it there. Why split the discussion if we don't need to?
We're also going to start diving more into tools. Things like our Hearthstone Deckbuilder can give us opportunities to be more than a site that is focused purely on content. Tools help create content, yet, but tools let everyone share their favourite things or let us give people ways to calculate important information in games they love. Tools should be the biggest part of our pie, it leads community, which is in front of good curated content.
In addition to tools, activities like our word searches are going to be right up there too. Giving folks more fun stuff to do outside of the games they play in quick bursts can be a great way to encourage signups. Nothing concrete to announce right now, but we should be seeing our prototype of our next Hearthstone tool very, very soon. One of our new staff members is quite passionate about it and I've built a tool to make the experience even better. Stay tuned!
I also want to make it easy for people to ignore the content they don't want to see. Having a personalized feed - even if that means it's only for Hearthstone stuff, is important and is something the site update delivers on. The homepage itself doesn't change, but everyone will have access to a new page on the site that will showcase filtered information that would otherwise be on the homepage. I'd eventually like to add more customization to it, such as being able to embed our Hearthstone deck widget onto it, but that will have to be down the line and be a greater discussion with the community of what they'd like to see pluggable there when the time comes.
So, no, Out of Cards is not coming back and being 100% in on Hearthstone will never happen. We will have people that dedicate themselves to Hearthstone, and if you want to subscribe to an Out of Cards experience, you would be able to subscribe to the card games you like to see that personalized feed for them, but we are very much going in the overall direction of supporting games as a whole.
And with that, supporting games as a whole with a consistent approach to community. I cannot stand how insane reddit's moderators are. They rule with an iron fist on the stupidest of topics and most importantly, every single damn subreddit has different rules which can make it difficult to be a part of.
One set of rules, site-wide. No NSFW content, no spamming, no hateful people, just quality discussion.
I miss Out of Cards too and it was a brand that I was fully in love with. I wanted Out of Games and Out of Cards to live side-by-side but our reality was that the niche site just doesn't work as well because of the limitations. It also split our staff with some folks only on Out of Games which meant there were even less eyes on Out of Cards. Had Out of Cards been a larger site, I think we could have pulled it off better. One big, happy community is better for all of us though, so let's focus on making that happen.
No idea where to drop this so feel free to forward it to Flux or move it to another place or delete it altogether. With all due respect, I'm not a big fan of the change from out of cards to out of games and I wonder if it wouldn't be better to revert that transition. I obviously miss tons of info about stuff like - actual visitor stats - add revenue stats - plans for the site, especially regarding ways to increase its reach
What I do note though is that the front page articles for stuff that isn't about card games has no comments while Hearthstone articles usually spark a little discussion. That makes me think these people are still OOG's main customers and their feed is currently clogged with stuff that doesn't seem to interest them very much (judging by the numbers of comments alone). As far as I know there's a lot going on behind the scenes but we can't really see that. What we do see though is that those behind the scenes efforts take away resources from Hearthstone stuff (see bug reports / feature requests forum and discord channel).
From a strictly logical standpoint I do get the concept of "digital card games have a very narrow target audience, let's better spread out" but it doesn't look like it works out so far.
So what I propose is to go back to the roots and primarily focus on beating hearthpwn as the go to HS page with all you have. As a secondary goal it made a lot of sense to open up to other card games with staff members that feel up to the task imo.
Please read this as constructive criticism from a day 1 user that has grown very fond of the site and its community. I am aware that all my reasoning is based on incomplete info and I have nothing but respect for the continued effort of Flux and all the staff. Thank you for providing this space for us.
Well, we get some nerfs but surprisingly few changes, given that elemental shaman is just dead on arrival.
- There's only two possible changes to Blindeye Sharpshooter. Either a mana increase to 4, or it gets the damage dealt reduced to 1. Both would very nearly remove the card as a competitive option, or at very least relegate the card to being a supporting card rather than as a full build around.
We've seen the same nerfs to steno, I would be very surprised if this card doesnt get the same treatment.
- Always a Bigger Jormungar would probably get a mana cost nerf to 3. Its harsh, but I seriously dont see how team5 can fix this one without changing how the mechanics work. We could make it not work with cleave effects, but Ive rarely seen team5 do mechanic changes and I dont expect it to be done here.
- Changes to Order in the Court is likely entirely because it does it job way too well. Almost all the problems with paladin starts with this card: you simply see The Countess, The Garden's Grace, and Lightray way too often against pally.
Probably change it so it doesnt draw you a card. That'll slow down paladin substantially, probably even make the card nigh unplayable outside of highlander. We'll see what they'll do with this one.
i enjoyed naga DH while it lasted. it was fun and required a modicum of thought (naga, spell, naga, spell) more than other brainless combo or other highroll decks
Order in the Court will no longer draw a card. Might also cost one mana more.
Blindeye Sharpshooter will drop "Then switch" from its text.
Always a Bigger Jormungar will see a mana increase, but this will solve nothing, as the problem is the fact that it can also hit adjacent minions. How would the text limit that?
The Azerite Snake will become an end of turn effect.
I'm not saying this with a wealth of experience, but as far as I can tell Order in the Court is allowing the Paladin to get to its best cards with too much ease. The main problem is presumably because everything on the top-end has a Mana-cheat function built in, thus denying the actual 'cost' of the Paladin's highest-Cost cards. This could include:
Lightrays have been a staple of this "combo" for a while now.
As the game progresses, OitC also moves all of the lower-Cost "clutter" out of the way so the Paladin can drop value-bombs over and over again like The Countess. That consistency - combined with the Mana cheating - seems problematic.
Pick a Hand, Any Hand
Worked like a charm, even four years later :D
Site health check?
Now that you say that, I can definitely read it the way you intended.
You'd be surprised at how many people want to know the nitty gritty, and I get it, no one really shares that information and we're all curious beings.
I took look forward to the future and bringing back our holiday site event.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
I think they should have nerfed Lightray and The Garden's Grace instead of Order in the Court. Alternatively they could change the mechanics so cards that reduce their own cost will also be cheaper in the deck and not just in hand. Then Order in the Court could shuffle Lightray to the bottom of your deck.
It would create an interesting decision for when to play OitC. You could play it early to put Lightray/The Garden's Grace towards the top of your deck, but you lose tempo and will have dead draws for a few turns.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
My opinion on the nerfs/buffs:
Blindeye Sharpshooter:... Uh what? Is this supposed to be a nerf? The problem is that it can OTK you on like turns 3-4. This change does NOTHING to change the "feels bad" part of the card. It only makes it easier to clear, IF you somehow survive. This nerf changes nothing from what i can tell. I really was expecting at least a +1 mana nerf.
Always a Bigger Jormungar: Great change. This makes it harder to draw, since Trinket Tracker doesn't tutor it anymore. And it costing 2 mana makes it harder to combo with the cleave minions, which often slows down the deck. I.m.o. it's a good thing that this deck got nerfed, because it punished minion based strategies and promoted OTK/Kill from in hand strategies. Board should matter, and this nerf makes board based decks better again.
Order in the Court: Removing the draw makes it so it's not re-order your deck + free instant Lightray or The Garden's Grace. Instead you will now only get the consistancy. Which is still a great thing. Reminder that Lorekeeper Polkelt was basically in every paladin deck because of the provided consistancy. Even after polkelt was nerfed to 5 mana, paladin still used it. Order in the Court will continue to see play regardless. TLDR: It will be a bit weaker, but will continue to see play in pretty much every paladin deck because it makes the decks consistant.
Defense Attorney Nathanos: Interesting change. Making it synergise better with the current deathrattles is a nice buff. However i'm not certain if this makes any change. Nathanos will rotate next expansion, so in terms of Standard this will only be relevant for this expansion + mini set. Soo it only has a very limited time in the spotlight, and honestly i don't think this buff will change anything. I feel like Highlander hunter also still has plenty of better plays around that mana range, so unless deathrattle hunter gets pushed hard in the mini-set i'm not sure if this will see play.
The Azerite Snake: Honestly i thought they were gonna go "Deal 10 damage to your opponent. Gain health equal to the damage dealth." with the nerf, but seeing only 3 damage go away is a bit dissapointing. You now need to play this 5 times instead of 3 times in order to kill your opponent. I'm a bit dissapointed with this nerf, because i feel like the excavate package was supposed to be a control package instead of a combo package. And this change makes it so it continues to be a combo deck that feels horrible to play against. At least we now have a bigger window to outdamage their "healing" during their bounces.
Kinda surprised Crusader Aura didn't get hit, because it really feels like an outlier. (Seriously why did paladin get a 4 mana Bloodlust that lasts 3 turns and ALSO gives +1 health buff?!?)
Overall i'm not that excited about this wave of nerfs. I.m.o only 2/5 changes feel good. (Order and Jormungar) But luckely this is just based on early outliers. (Still surprised Aura isn't an outlier) So late next week we hopefully have some changes based on more data, and thus more potential nerfs. Personally i do enjoy the meta when i'm not playing against paladin, so lets hope the post-nerf meta will be even more fun!
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
I'm going to respectfully disagree. Most of the games I've won with this deck have been due to a single, huge pop-off turn, making the health irrelevant. More often than not, I play Blindeye Sharpshooter for only 2 mana thanks to Load the Chamber. A mana-cost nerf would have been more impactful.
I will also share that I have won a few games by playing Blindeye Sharpshooter on turn 3 and having it live due to its health, and I've also had a few games where the pop-off turn wasn't quite lethal, but my opponent couldn't remove it, so I got to go again. In these cases, yes, the health nerf definitely makes a difference. These scenarios are few and far between though.
Site health check?
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and plans in so much detail! There’s certainly a lot to look forward to.
One thing I’d like to note is that I never meant to ask you to share site visitor or add revenue stats. I only mentioned those bulletpoints to make it clear that I’m aware of the fact that there’s a ton of stuff to take into consideration and the general public doesn’t know anything about it.
Again: Thank you very much to sticking to the quality over quantity approach and building this awesome community. I can’t wait to see what’s next
orlandoolivia106
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Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
Very tame standard nerfs overall, kinda reminds me of the small nerfs they did back in the day. Just slight adjustments and probably won't make much of a difference. Least the nerf to Azerite Snake will delay the bouncing combo quite a bit but I'm sure these archetypes will remain quite strong. I did hear we may be getting another balance patch later next week if things don't change at all.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
Its only a brilliant nerf if the idea is to keep its essential power level but disallowing a naked sharpshooter on 3 turn, which to be fair happens rarely anyway.
I think team5 wants to monitor this a bit more before removing its viability. Its a cool new thing for dhunter and its a new expansion they'd probably want to avoid killing it early.
But with regards to what the deck was already doing, it'll continue doing it, which I get is not exactly what the community wants or expected.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
Also lower health can be important in rare cases of things like Hunter Secrets that can damage minion why being played.
Guan Yu Uther Re-Enters the Hearthstone Shop in This Week's Update
Guan Yu Uther looks so good. It's just a shame it doesn't have custom animations even tho in hero selection it implies it's a premium skin since it has a full artwork.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
At least Murlocs are nerfed. Murky was such a big powerspike, and Bassgill did have some obscene flexibility.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
I'll be the first to say it: this was the correct nerf for Blindeye Sharpshooter. This is what I'd call an "invisible nerf". It's not something you the opponent will ever notice. However, this does mean that Blindeye Sharpshooter is now completely useless outside of the combo turn. You cannot play it on the board preemptively, which slows down the Demon Hunter and gives them a dead draw in the early game, which in turn opens them up to aggro decks, which in turn reduces the deck's overall winrate and thus playrate.
I think that's a brilliant change. Nerfing the effect would've just killed the card and also killed the archetype, while this way the deck can exist in a more fair state.
Site health check?
Realistically, we can't be a Hearthstone-only site. Even look at the biggest Hearthstone sites online, they aren't getting the traffic they once did and by extension they are not doing great. Larger companies are keeping them around because it's worth having the property in your portfolio, and not because it's necessarily very profitable. Look at our old home - I'm not saying we've done a super good job recently, but they've been quite a bit late to some reveals, they also can go many days at a time without posting anything particularly interesting. They don't have anyone properly paying attention to that site.
Yes, our primary folks visiting and interacting are still Hearthstone, but we are seeing more traction as time goes on and as we try new things for the "games" side of the site. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is Out of Games. The end vision is to continue supporting Hearthstone for many years to come and to have more than that too.
One of the most difficult things to do is to get people to sign up for your website. "Why do I need another account". This problem ultimately needs to be solved and we need to find good reasons for people to join our community and good places to promote the fact they can sign up - a lot of sites these days seem to not have registration systems and instead exist just to farm pageviews with crappy seo content - fun! Leveraging our community-focused side of the site to bring more people in is going to be a big thing going forward.
I don't disagree with you. I'm not particularly happy about it and it can certainly be a demotivator at times, but on the flip side it increases the drive to try new stuff. We're trying to push more content through social media, and new ways to engage with people, which has been working more this month and I've been happy to see some of that result in more site traffic.
Written media is on a decline, and it really pisses me off. It's difficult to hold people's attention because it isn't a 15 second TikTok clip with robovoice. Video is currently the king of content online and through those platforms, so not your own platform, you can build an audience. But, does that translate well to your own site? Not really.
On the social media side, man. There's your video social (YouTube, TikTok, Facebook/Instagram Reels) and your traditional link social (Twitter, Facebook) and Twitter is feeling like it is less and less worth it with them changing their algorithm to make discovery harder. Facebook, if you aren't paying them money, they aren't sending you viewers anymore. Then the video stuff, if you focus on video, now we're no longer focusing on our written side of the site.
Where else can you promote your website? Reddit... and Discords. Sharing your content on Discord servers though is varied and may not be allowed in a lot of places. Reddit is similar with every subreddit having a different rule set. Promoting your own content outside of organic google traffic is just harder than it once was. We also have a team that doesn't like promoting their own great content on sites like reddit, which you kinda need everyone to promote their own content instead of one person promoting all the content, just due to the way those places work, which could be some nice additional traffic.
I don't think we've ever really showcased our traffic stats? We've done a few infographics at the end of the year to showcase the community, but other than that, traffic stats haven't been public - though please do correct me if I'm wrong. Sites generally don't make that information available to the public as competition can more easily see what works and let's them copycat more easily.
We showcase view metrics on user-created content because people like to see how well their content is doing compared to everyone else, and it serves as a good metric, outside of votes, for people to sort content by to find good stuff.
Similarly to traffic stats, this is private information. The vast majority of our site staff don't have access to this information and instead, they get to see a more general view of our ups and downs in traffic. One could certainly put some pieces together to figure out a rough guess of what the site makes, and maybe someone on staff has but hasn't said anything about it, but yeah, that's something we're likely to keep private.
What I will say, is the site is a money hole and I haven't been full time on it for a couple of years because I've been working full-time. I wish it wasn't the case because it has clearly had a large impact on the site, but running the site without ads for a good portion of the early days pulled us into a bad position for sustainability and we've been playing catch-up since. I haven't said anything about it in public because the last thing I wanted to do was cause alarm bells to ring and people leave the site because it didn't look like I was a big part of it anymore. Nope, I still am, just not the 10-12 hours a day I used to be. I could have also made some smarter decisions with our infrastructure costs, which are now greatly reduced vs our early days. Covid also fucked us pretty hard for a variety of reasons and I lost a ton of money from that. Oh joy!
Discord, honestly, has never been a big priority for me. Discord is chaos, and if anything, takes away from the site itself. Insightful conversations on Discord are lost immediately because people won't be able to reliably find them in the future. I'm quite against Discord for that reason, so much good information is being locked behind joining Discord servers.
It's difficult to find quality additions for our team. I want people that will treat it seriously and have the time to help us push great content every single day and have multiple hours they can dedicated to the cause. I love our folks that don't have that kind of time anymore too because we get some genuinely good stuff from it and without a healthy mix of the two, I don't think you end up with as good of a product. The biggest issue though is people want to get paid and if your traffic isn't great, there's not a huge sell to working on the site when everything is revenue sharing based.
We don't have an unlimited budget because we're independant. I've had several offers throughout the years to buy the site which could have injected large amounts of capital into it, but then I lose control of it and I don't know how new ownership would feel in a year from then or even a month. Out of Games will always be independant, it just means the growth is slower.
Earlier in the year I talked about us being close to shipping a site update. We were! We were quite close to pushing it but changes kept creeping in and deadlines were missed and then heavy news cycles took away attention (and irl responsibilities too) and so that update never got pushed. Since then, a lot has changed with our big site update and I've got a few bits that still need to be styled before we can push it out.
I'll talk a little bit about expectations.
The forums as they are currently known are getting destroyed - however I use that word incorrectly because all the content is being preserved. I love the forums, I love forums in general; I love being able to chronologically look at the way people are having a conversation. Forums don't work for our site anymore. Every game will, going forward, have it's own "forum" and each of those "forums" will have the ability to tag topics so that they can be filtered. You want to look at Card Discussion? Click on the topic tag for it!
One big problem our forums have always had is having all the content spaced out into so many different sections. There may have been conversations happening in half a dozen different forums this hour, but going to each of those forums, they effectively look dead. People don't want to be a part of a discussion place that looks dead.
Portals. I mean, Realms. Games exist as a Realm on the site. Much like how today you can go to our Hearthstone Portal, there will instead be a Hearthstone Realm which will put our curated content at the forefront and the community's content alongside it.
Maybe we don't need to cover a thing about Hearthstone Esports because someone has made a really good thread for it and people are already talking about it there. Why split the discussion if we don't need to?
We're also going to start diving more into tools. Things like our Hearthstone Deckbuilder can give us opportunities to be more than a site that is focused purely on content. Tools help create content, yet, but tools let everyone share their favourite things or let us give people ways to calculate important information in games they love. Tools should be the biggest part of our pie, it leads community, which is in front of good curated content.
In addition to tools, activities like our word searches are going to be right up there too. Giving folks more fun stuff to do outside of the games they play in quick bursts can be a great way to encourage signups. Nothing concrete to announce right now, but we should be seeing our prototype of our next Hearthstone tool very, very soon. One of our new staff members is quite passionate about it and I've built a tool to make the experience even better. Stay tuned!
I also want to make it easy for people to ignore the content they don't want to see. Having a personalized feed - even if that means it's only for Hearthstone stuff, is important and is something the site update delivers on. The homepage itself doesn't change, but everyone will have access to a new page on the site that will showcase filtered information that would otherwise be on the homepage. I'd eventually like to add more customization to it, such as being able to embed our Hearthstone deck widget onto it, but that will have to be down the line and be a greater discussion with the community of what they'd like to see pluggable there when the time comes.
So, no, Out of Cards is not coming back and being 100% in on Hearthstone will never happen. We will have people that dedicate themselves to Hearthstone, and if you want to subscribe to an Out of Cards experience, you would be able to subscribe to the card games you like to see that personalized feed for them, but we are very much going in the overall direction of supporting games as a whole.
And with that, supporting games as a whole with a consistent approach to community. I cannot stand how insane reddit's moderators are. They rule with an iron fist on the stupidest of topics and most importantly, every single damn subreddit has different rules which can make it difficult to be a part of.
One set of rules, site-wide. No NSFW content, no spamming, no hateful people, just quality discussion.
I miss Out of Cards too and it was a brand that I was fully in love with. I wanted Out of Games and Out of Cards to live side-by-side but our reality was that the niche site just doesn't work as well because of the limitations. It also split our staff with some folks only on Out of Games which meant there were even less eyes on Out of Cards. Had Out of Cards been a larger site, I think we could have pulled it off better. One big, happy community is better for all of us though, so let's focus on making that happen.
Scholomance Academy
Where did all the cards go
Site health check?
No idea where to drop this so feel free to forward it to Flux or move it to another place or delete it altogether.
With all due respect, I'm not a big fan of the change from out of cards to out of games and I wonder if it wouldn't be better to revert that transition. I obviously miss tons of info about stuff like
- actual visitor stats
- add revenue stats
- plans for the site, especially regarding ways to increase its reach
What I do note though is that the front page articles for stuff that isn't about card games has no comments while Hearthstone articles usually spark a little discussion. That makes me think these people are still OOG's main customers and their feed is currently clogged with stuff that doesn't seem to interest them very much (judging by the numbers of comments alone). As far as I know there's a lot going on behind the scenes but we can't really see that. What we do see though is that those behind the scenes efforts take away resources from Hearthstone stuff (see bug reports / feature requests forum and discord channel).
From a strictly logical standpoint I do get the concept of "digital card games have a very narrow target audience, let's better spread out" but it doesn't look like it works out so far.
So what I propose is to go back to the roots and primarily focus on beating hearthpwn as the go to HS page with all you have. As a secondary goal it made a lot of sense to open up to other card games with staff members that feel up to the task imo.
Please read this as constructive criticism from a day 1 user that has grown very fond of the site and its community. I am aware that all my reasoning is based on incomplete info and I have nothing but respect for the continued effort of Flux and all the staff. Thank you for providing this space for us.
Tl;dr: OOC revival when?
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
Thx for the hasty info as always
Quest Trading - Play A Friend!
Battletag: vronco#2797
Region: ASIA
Trade Only?: Yes, you go first.
Quick games
papabingo
Hello my lovely friend. It's nice to meet you here, can we still play merge fruit together like when we were kids?
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
Well, we get some nerfs but surprisingly few changes, given that elemental shaman is just dead on arrival.
- There's only two possible changes to Blindeye Sharpshooter. Either a mana increase to 4, or it gets the damage dealt reduced to 1. Both would very nearly remove the card as a competitive option, or at very least relegate the card to being a supporting card rather than as a full build around.
We've seen the same nerfs to steno, I would be very surprised if this card doesnt get the same treatment.
- Always a Bigger Jormungar would probably get a mana cost nerf to 3. Its harsh, but I seriously dont see how team5 can fix this one without changing how the mechanics work. We could make it not work with cleave effects, but Ive rarely seen team5 do mechanic changes and I dont expect it to be done here.
- Changes to Order in the Court is likely entirely because it does it job way too well. Almost all the problems with paladin starts with this card: you simply see The Countess, The Garden's Grace, and Lightray way too often against pally.
Probably change it so it doesnt draw you a card. That'll slow down paladin substantially, probably even make the card nigh unplayable outside of highlander. We'll see what they'll do with this one.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
i enjoyed naga DH while it lasted. it was fun and required a modicum of thought (naga, spell, naga, spell) more than other brainless combo or other highroll decks
instadp2023
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Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
My guesses:
Order in the Court will no longer draw a card. Might also cost one mana more.
Blindeye Sharpshooter will drop "Then switch" from its text.
Always a Bigger Jormungar will see a mana increase, but this will solve nothing, as the problem is the fact that it can also hit adjacent minions. How would the text limit that?
The Azerite Snake will become an end of turn effect.
I have zero thoughts on the attorney.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
I'm not saying this with a wealth of experience, but as far as I can tell Order in the Court is allowing the Paladin to get to its best cards with too much ease. The main problem is presumably because everything on the top-end has a Mana-cheat function built in, thus denying the actual 'cost' of the Paladin's highest-Cost cards. This could include:
As the game progresses, OitC also moves all of the lower-Cost "clutter" out of the way so the Paladin can drop value-bombs over and over again like The Countess. That consistency - combined with the Mana cheating - seems problematic.
Hearthstone's 28.0.3 Badlands Balance Patch Detailed - Card Nerfs, Card Changes, Battlegrounds Adjustments, & Bug Fixes
You can also get 10 free burst damage with The Garden's Grace, and very consistenly get three 0-mana legendaries with The Countess.
I don't think the card is "broken", but it's very possible that Team 5 have stats that show it's a power outlier.