Monetization models for games as a service are just so weird
Yeah. It's kinda messed up how many games would be so good as $x purchases with cosmetic in-game purchases instead of this nonsense. I ran into that a lot with Clash Royale and is why I ultimately stopped playing it.
Rumble has such solid gameplay, and a bit of a grind is totally fine, just yeah "I just wish they'd make players jump through one fewer hoop with this upgrade system".
Yeah, after the initial "throw gold at them" it grinds to a halt.
I agree with dungeons being too long of a rotation. It super sucks if you can't do anything your first week in the game due to bad luck. I just so happened to join when it was Alliance focused and I picked Jaina as my first hero so I wasn't even aware that the dungeons weren't being uniquely tailored.
The talent system as a whole is unfortunately designed. I was able to achieve common on several minis unlocking possibilities of talents through a few weeks of play. With rare being so difficult to get though (and then epic) if you buy your first talent as the "wrong talent" then you're locking yourself out of talents with that mini for a long time.
I doubt we'll see the Battle.net launcher go away. There are millions of people conditioned to using it already, and people that use it avoid platform fees in other places when selling games or in-game content.
I do wonder if Call of Duty will eventually be leaving Battle.net though in favor of the Xbox app. It seems like Activision and Blizzard are being allowed to be separate entities again under Microsoft, so there's no real reason to keeping CoD on Battle.net. Maybe they push it there into a corner so they can get some sales still should people not want to go to Xbox or Steam, but no longer a main focus in the app.
I do hope Microsoft borrows BNet client engineers though to improve the Xbox app. So much potential but it just doesn't feel right. I don't know if the bnet team will have a good solution, but they've certainly done some great client work over the years.
I think that's great news. Steam is the biggest gaming platform so it will definitely boost the arrival of new players as long as Hearthstone actually has a decent score and is easy to find.
I personally wouldn't be switching to steam because I really don't mind bnet. If anything it has much simpler look and I honestly don't like steam and all of its addons that much.
It does make me wonder tho, is Microsoft planning to delete battle net? We are almost half way of all the blizzard games being on steam which will eventually make a question if battle net is at all necessary.
I just hope their online is improved and people won't be able to cheat the system like has been the case for GTA5. The online can genuinely be quite fun, but then someone joins the server and teleports everyone somewhere or they just kill you over and over again with cheats. Invincibility when fighting is also bullshit.
Probably no change to that though, so bring on the money drops I suppose. At least that was the only positive thing to come out of a primarily client-side peer-to-peer architecture.
GTA as a series has some pretty messed up themes overall that aren't very "2023" so it'll be interesting to see what direction Rockstar goes. I hope they stick to their roots and give people some crazy stuff to play because honestly, real life is a hell of a lot closer to the picture GTA 5 paints than the magical fairy kingdom that people on social media seem to believe exists and "how dare rockstar do x y and z".
Ahem, I guess he'll talk, but it'll be weird. I hope they take the One Piece approach when adapting it, because I guess it could work for Zelda.
Regarding the story, I'm guessing they'll go with either Ocarina or BotW. Both are massively popular and have stories that can be extended into film plots.
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Regarding GOTY, I don't know a single title that comes even remotely close to Baldur's gate. It's like the Elden Ring of this year.
But of course Zelda might be the winner even tho it doesn't deserve it in the slightest. There's nothing really new or groundbreaking with that title but of course Nintendo fanboys will try to make a classic out of it as usual.
If Starfield even appears on the nominees list, this competition is already a failure.
Gold gain in this game is horrendous, its like 800 gold a week. Good luck getting same 4 copies of your minis to get talent. And without talents you can't do heroics. Also dungeon system is terrible, rotations are too long. Waiting 5 weeks to lvl your hero was really dumb.
This is the definitive thread for you to tell us what's currently broken with the deckbuilder. That includes core functionality and cards that aren't flagged correctly.
We need feedback to know when stuff isn't working as expected. People that leave feedback inside of news article comments aren't helping us with visibility of issues. The deckbuilder experience should be smooth and cards should be showing up as expected.
Recently Fixed
Data can take a bit of time to uncache after changes are made to the Hearthstone database on our site so please be patient as the system catches up.
[NOV 8] Fixed an issue where multiclass cards were not correctly flagged.
[NOV 8] Fixed an issue where old Core Set cards were still flagged as if they were in the Core Set.
Originally I believe this was a data issue with the Hearthstone client. I was wrong. Our datamine scripts have been updated and this should, in theory, never be an issue going forward.
Current Issues
ETC doesn't allow you to add a sideboard.
The deckbuilder does not currently support sideboards, so this will require some new tech.
Dual tribes do not work
We don't have any support in the db for this but it is coming
Good to know, yeah it looks like support in Edge is considered experimental and you can enable to with a special flag.
No clue why its experimental considering it s on chromium lmao. Well, we'll refrain from using avifs going forward. Sometimes we get avif files and don't convert them but that's not a great experience if Edge is going to be silly. Thanks.
Now that I think about it, like Light's Justice, the upgraded hero power was also worse in this particular deck compared to other decks. You couldn't really use it until after quest completion, because 2 mana is better spent playing two 1-drops. Even if you found Tour Guide, it was often a losing gamble to use the discount on turn 4 instead of waiting one turn for the reward's buff to kick in.
In general, hero powers are useful to fill gaps in your mana curve, but you don't have gaps in the early game with a deck full of 1-drops, while in the late game you have huge gaps and one use the hero power per turn is not enough to fill them.
I've also spent a lot of time trying to make the Paladin questline work. I think the main problem is simply the amount of 1-mana cards you need to play to complete it. If you put your deck full of 1-mana cards, you can complete it on turn 4 relatively often, but still not super reliably. And then you're stuck with top-decking 1-mana cards for the remainder of the game, so you better hope that your hero power is enough to close out the game.
As you mentioned, Light's Justice wasn't terribly useful as a reward: often I would just go face with it, to use up all the charges in case I would be offered a better weapon from Blessed Goods later. I don't think Light's Justice is bad in general, but it is the wrong tool for this deck: it helps you trade up, but if you're playing all 1-drops, you can't afford to make a lot of trades, as you have to be pushing face damage to close out the game before your deck's power falls off.
Another approach was to put more dude (Silver Hand Recruit) synergy cards in the deck, but even a few would dramatically reduce the chance of completing the quest on turn 5 and on later turns the impact of both the 7/7 body and the quest reward is no longer enough to carry the game.
I've seen some people play the questline in Wild in a Dude Paladin deck that finishes the quest later in the game. I guess that with enough synergy cards, the upgraded hero power becomes powerful enough to justify weakening your opening hand. In Standard, that critical mass of synergy cards was never there.
One thing that could have helped is more cards that generate cards like Blessed Goods, which always offers a 1-mana option because Paladin secrets cost 1 mana, but can also produce more expensive cards in a top-deck situation. Another option would be to simply reduce the number of cards needed to advance one or more of the steps. As the quest reward can't be played before turn 5 anyway (*), I think easier completion wouldn't have made it overly powerful.
(*) Turn 1 is the questline itself, so you have 5 mana to spend on turn 2 and 3. Even if every one of the three steps would take 2 instead of 3 cards to be played, you couldn't coin out the reward on turn 4.
By the way, while the deck is widely considered to be unplayable, the win rate I got was actually not that far below 50%: I didn't measure it exactly, but I got decent progress on the "win 5 matches" weekly quest. However, when it won, it was usually very close, while when it lost, it was by a mile. So the deck felt worse to play than what the winrate would suggest.
A deck variation that might be worth mentioning is the inclusion of Lady Prestor, which takes advantage of the fact that many dragons have good battlecries. Still, I think overall she didn't make the deck better, but it did add some more variety.
I don't know about other people, but when a game is so obviously in the "spend money or you won't progress" monetization model it makes me even less willing to spend money on it. I just wish they'd make players jump through one fewer hoop with this upgrade system.
Monetization models for games as a service are just so weird. When Snap was still in beta I remember that Brode got some input from the community wondering why they were putting new cards behind the paywall of the season pass and pushing him to focus monetization on cosmetics instead - his response was something like (paraphrasing) cosmetic monetization isn't a great way to make money back, that riot was a huge outlier in that regard with LoL because the playerbase is humongous and other games just can't replicate that success out of the gate.
So obviously some sort of deal with a devil has to be made for free-to-play games, but in this case I think they'll end up losing most of their players over time unless they improve the upgrade system.
Well, Unholy was clearly supposed to be the "primary" Corpse rune, with cards like Meat Grinder, Plagued Grain, Graveyard Shift, Possessifier and Unholy Frenzy mostly existing to generate lots of Corpses. I forgive you for forgetting that any of those cards exist, because none of them saw any play.
The problem isn't Stitched Giant being in the wrong Runes, it's Blizzard overestimating how important Corpses would end up being and shooting way too low on how many cards should spend them.
Hearthstone is Coming to Steam? Datamined Steam Achievements, Account Linking UI, and More!
You can kinda already get an approximate of time played by looking at the number of wins in every mode
Hearthstone is Coming to Steam? Datamined Steam Achievements, Account Linking UI, and More!
I would definitelly play Hearthstone on steam but I am, glad it did not come earlier... I do not even want to think about time spent in-game
Let's Talk About Warcraft Rumble - First Impressions Review
Yeah. It's kinda messed up how many games would be so good as $x purchases with cosmetic in-game purchases instead of this nonsense. I ran into that a lot with Clash Royale and is why I ultimately stopped playing it.
Rumble has such solid gameplay, and a bit of a grind is totally fine, just yeah "I just wish they'd make players jump through one fewer hoop with this upgrade system".
Let's Talk About Warcraft Rumble - First Impressions Review
Yeah, after the initial "throw gold at them" it grinds to a halt.
I agree with dungeons being too long of a rotation. It super sucks if you can't do anything your first week in the game due to bad luck. I just so happened to join when it was Alliance focused and I picked Jaina as my first hero so I wasn't even aware that the dungeons weren't being uniquely tailored.
The talent system as a whole is unfortunately designed. I was able to achieve common on several minis unlocking possibilities of talents through a few weeks of play. With rare being so difficult to get though (and then epic) if you buy your first talent as the "wrong talent" then you're locking yourself out of talents with that mini for a long time.
Hearthstone is Coming to Steam? Datamined Steam Achievements, Account Linking UI, and More!
Nice! Another Activision-Blizzard game to flood with negative reviews to oblivion!
Hearthstone is Coming to Steam? Datamined Steam Achievements, Account Linking UI, and More!
I doubt we'll see the Battle.net launcher go away. There are millions of people conditioned to using it already, and people that use it avoid platform fees in other places when selling games or in-game content.
I do wonder if Call of Duty will eventually be leaving Battle.net though in favor of the Xbox app. It seems like Activision and Blizzard are being allowed to be separate entities again under Microsoft, so there's no real reason to keeping CoD on Battle.net. Maybe they push it there into a corner so they can get some sales still should people not want to go to Xbox or Steam, but no longer a main focus in the app.
I do hope Microsoft borrows BNet client engineers though to improve the Xbox app. So much potential but it just doesn't feel right. I don't know if the bnet team will have a good solution, but they've certainly done some great client work over the years.
Hearthstone is Coming to Steam? Datamined Steam Achievements, Account Linking UI, and More!
I think that's great news. Steam is the biggest gaming platform so it will definitely boost the arrival of new players as long as Hearthstone actually has a decent score and is easy to find.
I personally wouldn't be switching to steam because I really don't mind bnet. If anything it has much simpler look and I honestly don't like steam and all of its addons that much.
It does make me wonder tho, is Microsoft planning to delete battle net? We are almost half way of all the blizzard games being on steam which will eventually make a question if battle net is at all necessary.
Rockstar Games Confirms the Debut of the New Grand Theft Auto's Trailer Reveal in December
If the trailer isn't revealed during the game awards, I'm changing my username to Nermal for a year.
Rockstar Games Confirms the Debut of the New Grand Theft Auto's Trailer Reveal in December
I just hope their online is improved and people won't be able to cheat the system like has been the case for GTA5. The online can genuinely be quite fun, but then someone joins the server and teleports everyone somewhere or they just kill you over and over again with cheats. Invincibility when fighting is also bullshit.
Probably no change to that though, so bring on the money drops I suppose. At least that was the only positive thing to come out of a primarily client-side peer-to-peer architecture.
GTA as a series has some pretty messed up themes overall that aren't very "2023" so it'll be interesting to see what direction Rockstar goes. I hope they stick to their roots and give people some crazy stuff to play because honestly, real life is a hell of a lot closer to the picture GTA 5 paints than the magical fairy kingdom that people on social media seem to believe exists and "how dare rockstar do x y and z".
Rockstar Games Confirms the Debut of the New Grand Theft Auto's Trailer Reveal in December
I feel like the next gta will be a first big flop story wise.
HS Collection and Runeterra Collection pages not working
The update should be going live Fridayish, in time for updates to be made to collections prior to the launch of the expansion.
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Nintendo Announces Development of a Live-Action Legend of Zelda Film
Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuse me princess.
Ahem, I guess he'll talk, but it'll be weird. I hope they take the One Piece approach when adapting it, because I guess it could work for Zelda.
Regarding the story, I'm guessing they'll go with either Ocarina or BotW. Both are massively popular and have stories that can be extended into film plots.
MmentoMori
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The Game Awards To Announce Nominees Next Week
Regarding GOTY, I don't know a single title that comes even remotely close to Baldur's gate. It's like the Elden Ring of this year.
But of course Zelda might be the winner even tho it doesn't deserve it in the slightest. There's nothing really new or groundbreaking with that title but of course Nintendo fanboys will try to make a classic out of it as usual.
If Starfield even appears on the nominees list, this competition is already a failure.
HS Collection and Runeterra Collection pages not working
When can we expect the changes to be implemented? What needs to be done so the changes are not blocked?
Hope this gets fixed soon, thanks for the response
Let's Talk About Warcraft Rumble - First Impressions Review
Gold gain in this game is horrendous, its like 800 gold a week. Good luck getting same 4 copies of your minis to get talent. And without talents you can't do heroics. Also dungeon system is terrible, rotations are too long. Waiting 5 weeks to lvl your hero was really dumb.
What's Wrong With Our Deckbuilder - Hearthstone Edition
This is the definitive thread for you to tell us what's currently broken with the deckbuilder. That includes core functionality and cards that aren't flagged correctly.
We need feedback to know when stuff isn't working as expected. People that leave feedback inside of news article comments aren't helping us with visibility of issues. The deckbuilder experience should be smooth and cards should be showing up as expected.
Recently Fixed
Data can take a bit of time to uncache after changes are made to the Hearthstone database on our site so please be patient as the system catches up.
Current Issues
Hearthstone's New Badlands In-Game Event to Reward 5 Catch-Up Packs, Rafaam Hero Skin, & More
Good to know, yeah it looks like support in Edge is considered experimental and you can enable to with a special flag.
No clue why its experimental considering it s on chromium lmao. Well, we'll refrain from using avifs going forward. Sometimes we get avif files and don't convert them but that's not a great experience if Edge is going to be silly. Thanks.
Hearthstone What's Next Panel Live Recap - BlizzCon 2023: Plus New Card Reveals!
Its a good counter to Warlock so no I don't think it will get reworked.
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Mage, Paladin, Priest & Rogue Quests
Now that I think about it, like Light's Justice, the upgraded hero power was also worse in this particular deck compared to other decks. You couldn't really use it until after quest completion, because 2 mana is better spent playing two 1-drops. Even if you found Tour Guide, it was often a losing gamble to use the discount on turn 4 instead of waiting one turn for the reward's buff to kick in.
In general, hero powers are useful to fill gaps in your mana curve, but you don't have gaps in the early game with a deck full of 1-drops, while in the late game you have huge gaps and one use the hero power per turn is not enough to fill them.
Should Questlines Return to Hearthstone? Looking Back at Stormwind's Mage, Paladin, Priest & Rogue Quests
I've also spent a lot of time trying to make the Paladin questline work. I think the main problem is simply the amount of 1-mana cards you need to play to complete it. If you put your deck full of 1-mana cards, you can complete it on turn 4 relatively often, but still not super reliably. And then you're stuck with top-decking 1-mana cards for the remainder of the game, so you better hope that your hero power is enough to close out the game.
As you mentioned, Light's Justice wasn't terribly useful as a reward: often I would just go face with it, to use up all the charges in case I would be offered a better weapon from Blessed Goods later. I don't think Light's Justice is bad in general, but it is the wrong tool for this deck: it helps you trade up, but if you're playing all 1-drops, you can't afford to make a lot of trades, as you have to be pushing face damage to close out the game before your deck's power falls off.
Another approach was to put more dude (Silver Hand Recruit) synergy cards in the deck, but even a few would dramatically reduce the chance of completing the quest on turn 5 and on later turns the impact of both the 7/7 body and the quest reward is no longer enough to carry the game.
I've seen some people play the questline in Wild in a Dude Paladin deck that finishes the quest later in the game. I guess that with enough synergy cards, the upgraded hero power becomes powerful enough to justify weakening your opening hand. In Standard, that critical mass of synergy cards was never there.
One thing that could have helped is more cards that generate cards like Blessed Goods, which always offers a 1-mana option because Paladin secrets cost 1 mana, but can also produce more expensive cards in a top-deck situation. Another option would be to simply reduce the number of cards needed to advance one or more of the steps. As the quest reward can't be played before turn 5 anyway (*), I think easier completion wouldn't have made it overly powerful.
(*) Turn 1 is the questline itself, so you have 5 mana to spend on turn 2 and 3. Even if every one of the three steps would take 2 instead of 3 cards to be played, you couldn't coin out the reward on turn 4.
By the way, while the deck is widely considered to be unplayable, the win rate I got was actually not that far below 50%: I didn't measure it exactly, but I got decent progress on the "win 5 matches" weekly quest. However, when it won, it was usually very close, while when it lost, it was by a mile. So the deck felt worse to play than what the winrate would suggest.
A deck variation that might be worth mentioning is the inclusion of Lady Prestor, which takes advantage of the fact that many dragons have good battlecries. Still, I think overall she didn't make the deck better, but it did add some more variety.
Let's Talk About Warcraft Rumble - First Impressions Review
Good article.
I don't know about other people, but when a game is so obviously in the "spend money or you won't progress" monetization model it makes me even less willing to spend money on it. I just wish they'd make players jump through one fewer hoop with this upgrade system.
Monetization models for games as a service are just so weird. When Snap was still in beta I remember that Brode got some input from the community wondering why they were putting new cards behind the paywall of the season pass and pushing him to focus monetization on cosmetics instead - his response was something like (paraphrasing) cosmetic monetization isn't a great way to make money back, that riot was a huge outlier in that regard with LoL because the playerbase is humongous and other games just can't replicate that success out of the gate.
So obviously some sort of deal with a devil has to be made for free-to-play games, but in this case I think they'll end up losing most of their players over time unless they improve the upgrade system.
Hearthstone's Badlands Patch Brings 1 Card Balance Change, Format Adjustments, & Plenty of Bug Fixes
Well, Unholy was clearly supposed to be the "primary" Corpse rune, with cards like Meat Grinder, Plagued Grain, Graveyard Shift, Possessifier and Unholy Frenzy mostly existing to generate lots of Corpses. I forgive you for forgetting that any of those cards exist, because none of them saw any play.
The problem isn't Stitched Giant being in the wrong Runes, it's Blizzard overestimating how important Corpses would end up being and shooting way too low on how many cards should spend them.