Its to do with the fact that both naga mage and APM druid tends to infuriate their opponents, and its also to do with the fact that hearthstone is played on an engine that doesnt speed up or skip animations and yet respects the turn timer, so what happens is (and very often on a phone) your opponent would be caught watching animations for much longer than they should, sometimes skipping their turns while they helplessly fume on the side.
Losing to decks like moonbeam druid or big priest may not be pleasant, but its less toxic because at the very least you're allowed to play the game. Admitably its mostly perception, but in a product where fun is supposedly the goal its not unusual for developers to err on the side of the majority.
i would much rather watch my opponent draw and play 27 cards in one turn than watch my opponent do nothing for 3 turns and then play neptulon. one of them requires extremely good execution to pull off and can easily be delayed/shut down with dirty rat or spell cost increase cards, the other is the easiest shit on the planet.
if blizzard has a problem with lack of interactivity, then they should print more cards that interact with combo decks instead of banning every interesting combo deck out of the game. they need to learn from (and i cant believe im saying this) wizards of the coast and create an environment where combo decks can exist and be interacted with.
for example, one of my favorite decks of all time in any game is charbelcher in mtg's legacy format. its a deck that centers around creating enough mana as quickly as possible to play one artifact called goblin charbelcher that when activated instantly kills the opponent. it can win as early as turn 1 and usually wins between turns 2-5. however, goblin charbelcher is a mid tier deck (at best) in that format because there is such a wide variety of countermagic, hand disruption and mana taxing permanents that it becomes very difficult to beat a lot of decks, especially after the first round when sideboarding comes into play. this forces you to think heavily about when and how to combo against every deck and encourages creativity on both sides.
if you hate playing against combo decks, you shouldnt want them to ban every one of them out of the game. you should want them to give you more tools to be able to beat them and more ways to access those tools consistently.
but wouldn't you call it obnoxious to play out 8 turns of a game winning and then lose to an otk moonbeam combo out of nowhere? by this logic, why shouldn't that deck be nerfed? ive killed people way earlier with moonbeam than i have with naga mage, the main difference is that naga mage requires significantly more execution in exchange for being a bit more consistent. you can find a way out of almost anything but you have to be able to play your ass off to discover an answer in many cases, and your nagas usually only serve to delay the game until you can burn your opponent.
moonbeam is objectively less interactive than naga mage, but its allowed to stay? its an incredibly ambiguous standard that carries into wild, where big priest has consistently led to awful, uninteractive games for a fraction of the effort required by apm decks AND it doesnt lose to dirty rat, yet big priest gets barely nerfed while apm decks get taken out of the game completely.
also, thanks for being polite. i tend to draw in a lot of hate when i post about combo decks, and you've been very kind.
its not an unstoppable combo as it is with the different methods of increasing card cost and disrupting your opponent's hand. would it not make more sense to give players the tools to combat fast combo decks (e.g. counterspells and cost-increase permanents in mtg) rather than ruin an entire archetype of deck?
wild also really doesnt have much in terms of combo anymore thanks to blizzard. combo priest and quest mage are technically still possible but pillager rogue got shafted and now overload shaman is too.
also, for the record, the average player logically hates having to play against a neptulon on turn 4, yet blizzard still only slightly nerfs big priest despite it creating unfun and unfair gameplay for YEARS despite being one of the single easiest decks to play in the game's history.
thank you for being cordial with your reply. people almost never are on this site when i try to advocate for the existence of combo decks (although i will say the replies on this post are significantly more kind than they've been in the past).
Thank you for this news! I saw the changed cards pop-up after logging in to the game, and I could not for the life of me figure out what was different about the Death Knight cards. I kept going over the costs and stats in my head, like "That's not changed." Didn't think about the runes.
I am 100% open to doing guest posts from the community!
The hardest part would be us getting up guidelines on how things get formatted, though anyone who has been reading our news feed for the past few years has likely picked up on it a bit ;)
As far as getting in touch, I'd send myself a private message here on the site about a topic and maybe a brief sample of what could be expected. If approved, we could then get it into our CMS and attached to your name. You can also send me an email!
I do have some plans in motion to let our community help us cover anything and everything though, with us being able to feature said content in our news feed - more details on that when it makes sense.
I don't know of any online game out there were people aren't always saying it's dying. I'd be willing to wager in most cases it's people not playing the game anymore being the ones crying about it too. Sunk cost fallacy is a helluva drug.
While these nerfs were definitely needed, I feel control archetypes won't thrive in Twist purely because of Jade Golems. I still remember very vividly how much of a tyrant Jade Druid was when KotFT launched. Add on to the next season's twist rule of XL decks, longer games just means bigger and bigger golems and control decks don't have infinite removal.
I appreciate those buffs, especially to Lord Jaraxxus so we can finally play him and HP on turn 10. The buffs to DK are a bit sad though as this may mean Blizzard is giving up on rainbow DK. This also hints that there's a flaw in the rune restriction system which I thoroughly enjoy as an idea but can see has some issues practically.
I don't see it that critically. The Spotlight Cache changes might have been controversial, but I think it's a good change. Not only do I get more than 1 new card a month with it (compared to before). While chasing cards I do want, I also get cards that I would have never purchased with Tokens and I still have fun experimenting with them. I guess the main thing people dislike is that you have less control over what cards you get, but I think that's the great thing about it.
The living Tribunal for example was seen as a generally bad card on release, so many people didn't purchase him with Tokens. Then he was in the Spotlight Cache rotation together with Jean grey, which many people wanted (and ironically turned out to be pretty meh), so naturally many people also got the living Tribunal and more people played with it. And it turned out: he's actually pretty good and a lot of fun on top of it. Hell, I even reached Infinite and won an infinite conquest with him. All of that didn't happen when he released under the old system.
As for the balance changes: I see where people are coming from, but I don't have a problem with it. Sure, it never feels good when cards you own get nerfed, but what's the alternative? Not nerfing strategies that are too good? Or even worse: not nerfing cards with big synergy potential that are indivitually so good that they are still played in a variaty of strategies, even if the card has nothing to do with it. Not doing either of that is the perfect recipe for extremely fast powercreep.
I've also seen people complain about them nerfing old instead of new cards when it comes to problematic strategies. Sure marketing, money etc. may or may not have something do with that. Neither of us can do anything other than guessing on that part. But it still seems reasonably to me from a player/meta perspective. Nerfing cards generally discourage people from experimenting with them and I'd rather have people experiment less with old cards (that people already experimented with a ton), than with new cards.
Take the controversial recent Collector nerf for example: Collector was nerfed specifically because of its synergie with Loki, which was released only a week before the nerf. They could have given Loki the -2 power nerf instead of the collector and the decks strength would still roughly be where it is today, but it would also ensure that Loki would never find a place in any deck that does not involve the collector. I don't want to discuss how succesfull this specific change was, but rather the idea, the concept behind it.
Lastly, and that's really nothing against you, but I don't like how inflationary the term "cash crab" has become. A cash crab describes a game that was cheaply made for the sole purpose of making money and that's usually following a current hype. Take the thousends of Battle Royale games that suddenly appeared during the big hype for example. Usually made within just a couple months using mostly existing, purchased, or quickly made assets and then abondend a few months after release to start working on the next game. There's even a whole genre for that on the mobile market called "hyper casual games" with companies that are releasing multiple games a month, sometimes even per week, in the hopes to make the next Flappy Bird. Not agreeing with a monetization does not make a game automatically a cash crab.
I know that this is a lot of text and I don't blame you or anyone else for not reading through all of this. It's just that these thoughts have been in my mind for a while now and for some reason I get especially "talky" after I wake up.
I'd imagine Tony would have a functional change after he rotates to wild. It would be funny if Blizzard changed his text to say copy your opponents deck seeing as piracy is all about copying files illegally 🙃
Might as well just kill the card like they did with Illucia
I did notice that you had to click on six samurais before clicking on "The warriors of yore" which makes me believe there will future six samurai gates
I'm sorry but I think the percentage of players like you is very small and blizzard cares more about the average player who logically hates being dead by turn 5 unstoppable combo. Wild is full of other combo high skill cap decks and in standard there's a real challenge for you, play nature shaman. It's still a good deck in the right hands, but I'm sure you're good enough to handle it.
Amazing breakdown and comparison between games. Definitely found the loot boxes in HOTS very lackluster and didn't bother with them at all. Just goes to show how a company (in this case GGG) can make loot boxes enticing to purchase. I do find though that I'm buying more boxes now since the duplicate protection than before. Then again, the fact the MTX add an extra gameplay interaction raises the value of each item in the boxes.
Appreciate the time you took detailing the comparisons and can definitely say GGG should be the king of MTX and loot boxes.
I think it's more like Microsoft wanted to enforce some restructuring so that the eventual restructure they wanted didn't fall back as Microsoft layoffs. So if that's the case, this is a good sign that Microsoft wants to ensure the team is successful and profitable, and they only saw fit to eliminate 10 positions to put it in a spot where it can meet their expectations.
There's still plenty of combo decks in standard. Nature shaman, drum druid, moonbeam druid, and I guess you can put rainbow mage into that as well. Every one of those require intricate planning, and much brain power to maximize win potential.
What has been capped at the knee are decks that might be fun to play, but not fun to suffer through. Naga mage and APM druid arent nerfed for being too strong, they're nerfed for being too obnoxious for the opposing player.
Got the same problem. It is in fact updating but its not showing in google play, you can view it in your phone's taskbar. Either way, its only like 29mb so it wont take long.
After that I disconnected, reconnected and the game was playable. Weird shit, but at least I can play again.
I'm personally done spending any money in this game. The game is made less and less affordable with each change to the game's economy, and then changes to cards you spent 6k tokens on yield no compensation. This greedy cash grab of a gotch ya game won't get my financial support any longer.
I think the player experience that Team 5 is trying to nerf is the one where I sit here and watch my Druid opponent draw and play 27 cards on one turn, while my screen dims from lack of use.
Interesting combos are welcome, lack of interactivity isn't.
Did they succeed? Time will tell, and a class with easy access to 20 mana will probably find a new path to shenanigans.
Wild Receives Numerous Balance Changes & Card Bans for Tony & Mechwarper
Its to do with the fact that both naga mage and APM druid tends to infuriate their opponents, and its also to do with the fact that hearthstone is played on an engine that doesnt speed up or skip animations and yet respects the turn timer, so what happens is (and very often on a phone) your opponent would be caught watching animations for much longer than they should, sometimes skipping their turns while they helplessly fume on the side.
Losing to decks like moonbeam druid or big priest may not be pleasant, but its less toxic because at the very least you're allowed to play the game. Admitably its mostly perception, but in a product where fun is supposedly the goal its not unusual for developers to err on the side of the majority.
Wild Receives Numerous Balance Changes & Card Bans for Tony & Mechwarper
i would much rather watch my opponent draw and play 27 cards in one turn than watch my opponent do nothing for 3 turns and then play neptulon. one of them requires extremely good execution to pull off and can easily be delayed/shut down with dirty rat or spell cost increase cards, the other is the easiest shit on the planet.
if blizzard has a problem with lack of interactivity, then they should print more cards that interact with combo decks instead of banning every interesting combo deck out of the game. they need to learn from (and i cant believe im saying this) wizards of the coast and create an environment where combo decks can exist and be interacted with.
for example, one of my favorite decks of all time in any game is charbelcher in mtg's legacy format. its a deck that centers around creating enough mana as quickly as possible to play one artifact called goblin charbelcher that when activated instantly kills the opponent. it can win as early as turn 1 and usually wins between turns 2-5. however, goblin charbelcher is a mid tier deck (at best) in that format because there is such a wide variety of countermagic, hand disruption and mana taxing permanents that it becomes very difficult to beat a lot of decks, especially after the first round when sideboarding comes into play. this forces you to think heavily about when and how to combo against every deck and encourages creativity on both sides.
if you hate playing against combo decks, you shouldnt want them to ban every one of them out of the game. you should want them to give you more tools to be able to beat them and more ways to access those tools consistently.
Wild Receives Numerous Balance Changes & Card Bans for Tony & Mechwarper
but wouldn't you call it obnoxious to play out 8 turns of a game winning and then lose to an otk moonbeam combo out of nowhere? by this logic, why shouldn't that deck be nerfed? ive killed people way earlier with moonbeam than i have with naga mage, the main difference is that naga mage requires significantly more execution in exchange for being a bit more consistent. you can find a way out of almost anything but you have to be able to play your ass off to discover an answer in many cases, and your nagas usually only serve to delay the game until you can burn your opponent.
moonbeam is objectively less interactive than naga mage, but its allowed to stay? its an incredibly ambiguous standard that carries into wild, where big priest has consistently led to awful, uninteractive games for a fraction of the effort required by apm decks AND it doesnt lose to dirty rat, yet big priest gets barely nerfed while apm decks get taken out of the game completely.
also, thanks for being polite. i tend to draw in a lot of hate when i post about combo decks, and you've been very kind.
Wild Receives Numerous Balance Changes & Card Bans for Tony & Mechwarper
its not an unstoppable combo as it is with the different methods of increasing card cost and disrupting your opponent's hand. would it not make more sense to give players the tools to combat fast combo decks (e.g. counterspells and cost-increase permanents in mtg) rather than ruin an entire archetype of deck?
wild also really doesnt have much in terms of combo anymore thanks to blizzard. combo priest and quest mage are technically still possible but pillager rogue got shafted and now overload shaman is too.
also, for the record, the average player logically hates having to play against a neptulon on turn 4, yet blizzard still only slightly nerfs big priest despite it creating unfun and unfair gameplay for YEARS despite being one of the single easiest decks to play in the game's history.
thank you for being cordial with your reply. people almost never are on this site when i try to advocate for the existence of combo decks (although i will say the replies on this post are significantly more kind than they've been in the past).
Epic Games Cutting 870 Jobs, Selling Bandcamp & More
It's been 4 years since then. How are they faring compared to current Steam?
Perhaps to really compete with Steam, they need the Workshop as well as the chat doodads and Community art/screenshot saving etc.
Oh yeah, and those gamified sales 'events'.
Hearthstone's New Standard Balance Changes Removes Gadgetzan Auctioneer - All Changes Detailed
Thank you for this news! I saw the changed cards pop-up after logging in to the game, and I could not for the life of me figure out what was different about the Death Knight cards. I kept going over the costs and stats in my head, like "That's not changed." Didn't think about the runes.
Out of Games is Looking For New Staff to Create Gaming Content
I am 100% open to doing guest posts from the community!
The hardest part would be us getting up guidelines on how things get formatted, though anyone who has been reading our news feed for the past few years has likely picked up on it a bit ;)
As far as getting in touch, I'd send myself a private message here on the site about a topic and maybe a brief sample of what could be expected. If approved, we could then get it into our CMS and attached to your name. You can also send me an email!
I do have some plans in motion to let our community help us cover anything and everything though, with us being able to feature said content in our news feed - more details on that when it makes sense.
Chris Metzen is the Warcraft Universe's New Executive Creative Director
Ain't that the truth!
I don't know of any online game out there were people aren't always saying it's dying. I'd be willing to wager in most cases it's people not playing the game anymore being the ones crying about it too. Sunk cost fallacy is a helluva drug.
Epic Games Cutting 870 Jobs, Selling Bandcamp & More
Least the laid off employees got a 6 month severance package. Don't recall Blizzard ever doing such nice things.
Hearthstone's Twist Format Gets a Huge Shakeup With 16 Buffs & Nerfs
While these nerfs were definitely needed, I feel control archetypes won't thrive in Twist purely because of Jade Golems. I still remember very vividly how much of a tyrant Jade Druid was when KotFT launched. Add on to the next season's twist rule of XL decks, longer games just means bigger and bigger golems and control decks don't have infinite removal.
Hearthstone's New Standard Balance Changes Removes Gadgetzan Auctioneer - All Changes Detailed
I appreciate those buffs, especially to Lord Jaraxxus so we can finally play him and HP on turn 10. The buffs to DK are a bit sad though as this may mean Blizzard is giving up on rainbow DK. This also hints that there's a flaw in the rune restriction system which I thoroughly enjoy as an idea but can see has some issues practically.
Marvel Snap's September 28 OTA Update Brings 6 Card Changes
I don't see it that critically. The Spotlight Cache changes might have been controversial, but I think it's a good change. Not only do I get more than 1 new card a month with it (compared to before). While chasing cards I do want, I also get cards that I would have never purchased with Tokens and I still have fun experimenting with them. I guess the main thing people dislike is that you have less control over what cards you get, but I think that's the great thing about it.
The living Tribunal for example was seen as a generally bad card on release, so many people didn't purchase him with Tokens. Then he was in the Spotlight Cache rotation together with Jean grey, which many people wanted (and ironically turned out to be pretty meh), so naturally many people also got the living Tribunal and more people played with it. And it turned out: he's actually pretty good and a lot of fun on top of it. Hell, I even reached Infinite and won an infinite conquest with him. All of that didn't happen when he released under the old system.
As for the balance changes: I see where people are coming from, but I don't have a problem with it. Sure, it never feels good when cards you own get nerfed, but what's the alternative? Not nerfing strategies that are too good? Or even worse: not nerfing cards with big synergy potential that are indivitually so good that they are still played in a variaty of strategies, even if the card has nothing to do with it. Not doing either of that is the perfect recipe for extremely fast powercreep.
I've also seen people complain about them nerfing old instead of new cards when it comes to problematic strategies. Sure marketing, money etc. may or may not have something do with that. Neither of us can do anything other than guessing on that part. But it still seems reasonably to me from a player/meta perspective. Nerfing cards generally discourage people from experimenting with them and I'd rather have people experiment less with old cards (that people already experimented with a ton), than with new cards.
Take the controversial recent Collector nerf for example: Collector was nerfed specifically because of its synergie with Loki, which was released only a week before the nerf. They could have given Loki the -2 power nerf instead of the collector and the decks strength would still roughly be where it is today, but it would also ensure that Loki would never find a place in any deck that does not involve the collector. I don't want to discuss how succesfull this specific change was, but rather the idea, the concept behind it.
Lastly, and that's really nothing against you, but I don't like how inflationary the term "cash crab" has become. A cash crab describes a game that was cheaply made for the sole purpose of making money and that's usually following a current hype. Take the thousends of Battle Royale games that suddenly appeared during the big hype for example. Usually made within just a couple months using mostly existing, purchased, or quickly made assets and then abondend a few months after release to start working on the next game. There's even a whole genre for that on the mobile market called "hyper casual games" with companies that are releasing multiple games a month, sometimes even per week, in the hopes to make the next Flappy Bird. Not agreeing with a monetization does not make a game automatically a cash crab.
I know that this is a lot of text and I don't blame you or anyone else for not reading through all of this. It's just that these thoughts have been in my mind for a while now and for some reason I get especially "talky" after I wake up.
Wild Receives Numerous Balance Changes & Card Bans for Tony & Mechwarper
I'd imagine Tony would have a functional change after he rotates to wild. It would be funny if Blizzard changed his text to say copy your opponents deck seeing as piracy is all about copying files illegally 🙃
Might as well just kill the card like they did with Illucia
Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel Adds New Solo Gate for the “Six Samurai” Archetype
I did notice that you had to click on six samurais before clicking on "The warriors of yore" which makes me believe there will future six samurai gates
Wild Receives Numerous Balance Changes & Card Bans for Tony & Mechwarper
I'm sorry but I think the percentage of players like you is very small and blizzard cares more about the average player who logically hates being dead by turn 5 unstoppable combo. Wild is full of other combo high skill cap decks and in standard there's a real challenge for you, play nature shaman. It's still a good deck in the right hands, but I'm sure you're good enough to handle it.
Path of Exile Has the Wackiest Microstransactions in Gaming
Amazing breakdown and comparison between games. Definitely found the loot boxes in HOTS very lackluster and didn't bother with them at all. Just goes to show how a company (in this case GGG) can make loot boxes enticing to purchase. I do find though that I'm buying more boxes now since the duplicate protection than before. Then again, the fact the MTX add an extra gameplay interaction raises the value of each item in the boxes.
Appreciate the time you took detailing the comparisons and can definitely say GGG should be the king of MTX and loot boxes.
Hearthstone's New Standard Balance Changes Removes Gadgetzan Auctioneer - All Changes Detailed
For me it shows up fine on mobile
Chris Metzen is the Warcraft Universe's New Executive Creative Director
Pretty sure people have been crying out about the game dying since Naxx came out and they didn't like Undertaker Hunter.
Chris Metzen is the Warcraft Universe's New Executive Creative Director
I think it's more like Microsoft wanted to enforce some restructuring so that the eventual restructure they wanted didn't fall back as Microsoft layoffs. So if that's the case, this is a good sign that Microsoft wants to ensure the team is successful and profitable, and they only saw fit to eliminate 10 positions to put it in a spot where it can meet their expectations.
HELP: can't play Hearthstone!
Yeah, all set now. Dang that was frustrating. I had a particularly long day and was just looking forward to a couple games before bed.
Wild Receives Numerous Balance Changes & Card Bans for Tony & Mechwarper
There's still plenty of combo decks in standard. Nature shaman, drum druid, moonbeam druid, and I guess you can put rainbow mage into that as well. Every one of those require intricate planning, and much brain power to maximize win potential.
What has been capped at the knee are decks that might be fun to play, but not fun to suffer through. Naga mage and APM druid arent nerfed for being too strong, they're nerfed for being too obnoxious for the opposing player.
HELP: can't play Hearthstone!
Got the same problem. It is in fact updating but its not showing in google play, you can view it in your phone's taskbar. Either way, its only like 29mb so it wont take long.
After that I disconnected, reconnected and the game was playable. Weird shit, but at least I can play again.
HELP: can't play Hearthstone!
Hearthstone says "Hearthstone has been updated - download the latest version." I go to the store, no update. It won't let me play the game!!!
Anyone know what this BS is and how to fix it?
Marvel Snap's September 28 OTA Update Brings 6 Card Changes
I'm personally done spending any money in this game. The game is made less and less affordable with each change to the game's economy, and then changes to cards you spent 6k tokens on yield no compensation. This greedy cash grab of a gotch ya game won't get my financial support any longer.
Wild Receives Numerous Balance Changes & Card Bans for Tony & Mechwarper
I think the player experience that Team 5 is trying to nerf is the one where I sit here and watch my Druid opponent draw and play 27 cards on one turn, while my screen dims from lack of use.
Interesting combos are welcome, lack of interactivity isn't.
Did they succeed? Time will tell, and a class with easy access to 20 mana will probably find a new path to shenanigans.